Hannah Strader’s lineage is known back to the ancestors
who came to the Colony of North Carolina about 1750. There is so much to say, in fact, that this is
the most text-heavy of all the individual pages of the Nathaniel Martin/Hannah Strader
website. Keep in mind that even though a great deal is mentioned here, this is still only a summary.

Much of the knowledge cited here comes as a result of the genealogical research
of Howard Frame in the 1960s and early 1970s. Howard was descended from Elizabeth Strader, a
sister of Hannah, who married Jeremiah Frame. The union of Jeremiah and Elizabeth was one of at
least six Strader/Frame marriages, entwining the clans to such a degree that the Strader
story was a natural focus of Howard’s investigations. Though Howard labored without
the advantages of the internet era, he succeeded in finding enough documentation to pencil in a
sketch of the family in early America. He found that Hannah’s bloodlines were thoroughly
German, most or all of them qualifying as “Pennsylvania Dutch.”

The easiest way to structure a discussion of Hannah’s forebears is to to begin with the
most ancient known and proceed chronologically. Below you will find three sections of text, each
launching with one of three immigrant ancestors -- Johann Heinrich Strader, John Jacob
Starr, or Heinrich Weitzel -- and proceeding down to Hannah. But first, it is useful to talk
about the Pennsylvania Dutch migration in general.

The story begins in a region of Germany known as the Palatinate. This area, part of the Rhineland,
lies just north of the Alsace-Lorraine region and up against the eastern borders of Luxembourg and
Belgium. By the early 1700s this area was home to a population divided into three major sects of
Christianity -- Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic. This division of power meant each group dreamed
of becoming dominant, and no lasting stability could be counted on until such time as that happened.
The prize was obvious. With the retreat of the plague years the land, a wonderfully
fertile agricultural zone, had become prosperous. Among those who coveted it were outsiders, hoping
to further their own interests by shifting the balance of control one way or another. The most
infamous meddler was the French monarch Louis XIV, the famous “Sun King.” During his tremendously
long reign (1643-1715) he repeatedly sent his armies over the border, ostensibly to support his
Catholic brethren, but also for purposes of pillage. A crisis developed following
a somewhat pointless invasion in 1707, a campaign apparently fueled by the ambitions of one of
Louis’s field marshalls rather than by the king himself. The invaders withdrew almost at once. Some
say that during the retreat of the French forces, the marshall gave the residents three days to
flee, and then the army destroyed everything on their way home, a “scorched earth” military tactic.
It is said that the fleeing people gathered eventually into refugee populations that had to fit
themselves into the societies of neighboring countries. More objective histories say that the
residents did not actually have to leave, but in the wake of an intensely cold winter of 1708-09
that destroyed orchards and vineyards that had stood for generations, the prospect of starting
over elsewhere did not seem so daunting given that the families were going to have to replant
fields and rebuild homes and barns and shops anyway. Moreover, even in peaceful times the
Palatinate was too crowded, leaving few opportunities for the younger generations of
agricultural families to obtain acreage sufficient to support a household. Soon pamphlets extolling
the virtues of the colonies of Pennsylvania and North Carolina began circulating in editions in the
tens of thousands of copies. Queen Anne of England, eager to help what she perceived as victims of
religious persecution, and Parliament, eager to fill the American possessions with white, Protestant
settlers but not wanting to deplete England to do so, approved a policy in 1709 that
granted free passage to any “citizens of foreign nations” that wished to settle there, provided
they swore allegiance to the Colonies when they arrived. Some, particularly a large surge of
Lutherans, immediately took advantage of this offer. From 1709 through the early 1750s, as the queen
continued to subsidize the voyages, many more followed, and the phenomenon began to draw more and
more Germans from beyond the Palatinate as well.

One of the key groups in this mass exodus consisted of families who had at first sought asylum
in the Netherlands. Perhaps some of them were biding their time hoping for the opportunity to
reclaim their homes in Germany, but political unrest prevailed in the France/Germany border
area for the remainder of the century. Eventually these families crossed the Atlantic. However,
having spent as much as thirty or forty years in Holland, they had become “Dutchified” in speech
and customs. As these later refugees crossed the Atlantic, many landed in Philadelphia and settled
in eastern Pennsylvania. This is the group famous today as the “Pennsylvania Dutch.” Hannah’s
forebears have been described as such here; however, strictly speaking the label only lightly
applies, because the relevant individuals spent at most a dozen years, and some probably only
a matter of weeks, within the bounds of Pennsylvania.

Hannah’s ancestors may well have rejected Pennsylvania as a long-term home because they were of
somewhat different character than their co-travellers. Many of the latter, thanks to the decades
spent in the Netherlands, had shifted their Lutheran or German Reformed religious affiliation to the
Dutch Reformed Church. Hannah’s people had resisted this change. The sub-group naturally felt more
comfortable cleaving to others like themselves, and one of the places they chose to gather was Guilford
County, NC, where they were better able to preserve their way of life with less pressure to assimilate.
Becoming speakers of English and having to use Anglicized versions of their names already represented
a sea change in their identities; they didn’t want to give up all they had stood for. So down the
famous Emigrant Trail came Johann Heinrich Strader, John Jacob Starr, and Heinrich Weitzel and the
women who were, or soon would be, their wives.

Johann Heinrich Strader

Johann Heinrich Strader was a great great grandfather of Hannah. He is one of only two of that
generation that has so far been identified by name, the other one being his son Henry’s
father-in-law Nicholas Holstein. The rest of the immigrants who will be discussed below, including
John Jacob Starr and Heinrich Weitzel, were one generation more recent -- great grandparents of Hannah.

Johann Heinrich was probably born in the early 1720s, though this is only an estimate. His
birthplace was probably the Netherlands because he used Johann (sometimes rendered as Johannes) rather
than Hans -- Hans being a “more German” variation of the name, which in English would be rendered as
John, Jack, or Johnny. Having this first name does not
mean he went by Johann, though. Many Palatinate households used naming traditions as an expression
of religious faith. The name honors John the Baptist and/or the Apostle John. The practice was so
common that -- as will be discussed below in the section dealing with John Jacob Starr -- the same
immediate family might contain more than one son with the first name Hans/Johann/Johannes/John. You
might think this would lead to confusion, but in that time and place, there was no problem, because
the person would be identified by his middle name. The same phenomenon occurred with girl children named after
the Virgin Mary. Sisters living in the same home might be named Maria Sofia, Maria Katarina, and
Maria Anna. They would be called Sofia, Katarina, and Anna by everyone they knew. They would
be expected to use the first name only on extremely formal occasions. This has bearing on genealogical
research because the “formal occasions” protocol was often applied in cases of marriage records,
censuses, deeds, and ships’ passenger lists.

The name Johann Heinrich Strader (rendered as Johann Henrich Ströder) appears on the ship
captain’s list of the Ranier, sailing out of Rotterdam and arriving in Philadelphia on 26
September 1749. The same day, a “John Henry Streader” is listed as having made his oath of
allegiance to the Colonies. The ship’s captain’s list also includes a Casper Streader
and a “Johannes Ströder junge” or Johann Jr.

It seems probable that Johann Heinrich Strader of the Ranier is the same man who was
Hannah’s great great grandfather, and that “Junior” was his son, who will henceforth be referred
to in this essay as Henry Strader. If so, it would make sense that Henry was a child at the time,
but the Ranier information does indicate that Junior signed his name, which implies he was old
enough to write. The two Johanns might have been cousins or even brothers, or an uncle and nephew;
the repetition of Johann as a first name doesn’t preclude any of these possibilities.

It is also possible there was some sort of relationship to Casper Streader. People
with names that are the same phonetically, travelling on the same voyage of the same ship? It is
tempting to connect those dots. However, no other evidence links Casper and Johann Heinrich. A
Casper Stratter of Alsace Township, Pennsylvania -- very likely to be the Casper Streader who
came on the Ranier -- left a will dated 1778 whose text survives, and that text makes no
mention of Johann Heinrich or of any relatives living in North Carolina, where Johann
Heinrich settled.

Deeds and other records from Guilford County establish that a Johann Heinrich Strader was living
there from about 1750 onward. Whether this was the individual who sailed on the Ranier in 1849
has yet to be conclusively proven, but if “our” Johann Heinrich did not come on that particular ship,
he came on one much like it, and was then part of a large migration of people like himself southward
from Pennsylvania. It is generally known that Palatinate families with the surnames Albright, Clapp, Faust,
Holt, Sharp (Scherb), Cortner (Goertner), Ingold, Brower, Keim, Staley, May, Amick (Ewigs), Smith,
Stack, Nease, Ingles, Leinberger, Strader, and Wyrick established a colony of their folk in the
period between 1745 and 1760 in the counties of Alamance, Granville, Guilford, Orange, and Caswell,
NC. These were families who had kept to the German Reformed and Lutheran sects. Where genealogical
uncertainty arises is in which deeds, tax lists, and church records refer to Johann Heinrich, and which
refer to his son. On this webpage, the father and son pair are called Johann Heinrich and Henry for
ease of identification, but in the records from the 1700s North Carolina, they would both have been
Henry Strader -- Strader being rendered phonetically in most cases, by clerks who had to decide
on the spot what spelling to use, clerks who perhaps were not entirely literate themselves. And to
complicate matters further, spelling was not a standarized sort of thing in the first place in those
pre-Noah Webster days.

When Johann Heinrich died is conjecture, because it is so impossible to distinguish him from his
son in the extant records. We will leave that as a mystery and discuss Henry, the son, because
some of the documentation from the later decades of the 1700s unquestionably refers to him and not
to his father. Among those documents are various Granville County, NC court records. These
include: 1) The will of John Holstein, dated May 1790, which granted “to brother-in-law Henry Streider
land in Granville on Adock Creek.” Henry is also mentioned as one of two executors of that will, the
other being Jacob Holstein, a brother of the author of the will. 2) A wedding record that links Henry
Straiter (yet another spelling) to Catherine Holstein and gives a wedding date of 31 May 1773. John,
Jacob, and Catherine Holstein were likely three of the children of one Nicholas Holstein (Hostine),
whose own will is recorded in Granville County.

Neither Henry Strader nor Catherine Holstein were mentioned by name in the within-the-family
records that survived into the 20th Century. Those records begin with the family Bible of Henry’s
grandson, Jacob Strader, whose contents do not include details on Henry’s generation. The earliest
forebears in that source are Daniel Strader -- son of Henry and father of Jacob -- and his
wife, Elizabeth Wensck. However, public-source records establish that Henry and Catherine did exist,
and they dwelled in the right place and right time -- and obviously had the right surname -- to have
been Daniel’s parents. Henry and Catherine definitely had a son named Daniel, and only the strictest
of genealogists would argue that it might be some other Daniel than the one who was Hannah’s grandfather.
In addition to Daniel, the names of three other children of Henry and Catherine have surfaced. Those three
were Henry, Adam, and Katy, with Daniel falling between Adam and Katy in the birth sequence. Three
other children, all younger, are listed in the 1790 census, but their names are not mentioned in
that source, only their genders (a girl then a boy then another girl) and age ranges. Henry was the eldest,
born in 1774. More children may have been born after 1790.

One date mentioned for Henry’s death is 1792, but this does not agree with land transaction
records. Again, the possible confusion with other Henry Straders is a factor, but it seems likely
the “right” Henry bought and sold Orange County, NC land between 1787 and 1801, one tract deeded to Jacob
Holstein in 1787 and another tract to his son Henry in 1794. The place of death for both Henry
and Catherine is also unclear. By the end of their lives, a new migration had begun. North Carolina was
now the “old country.” The “land of promise,” now that the Indian tribes were being pushed out of the
region beyond the Appalachians, was Ohio. Henry and Catherine may have been content with the homes they
had founded when young, and/or they may have died before the uprooting began. Their son Daniel, however,
heeded the call westward.

Daniel’s life is firmly documented, and so we know his birth occurred 7 April 1777 in Guilford County.
He was raised there as well. Six days after he turned twenty-one (i.e. 13 April 1798), he married
Elizabeth Wensck, who had been born 22 August 1776, also in Guilford County. The bondsmen mentioned
in the county marriage records is George Strader (rendered as George Steador), who was probably
Daniel’s first cousin, son of the George Strader who fought in the Revolutionary War.

The first of Daniel and Elizabeth’s children, Jacob, was born 26 February 1799, about ten months after
the wedding. Daniel and Elizabeth would go on to have many more offspring. The names of eleven children
have surfaced. This may not be the full count, because these eleven names refer to children who reached
adulthood. There may have been others who perished in infancy or in early childhood whose identities have
been lost. Eleven may also be one too many names (see below).

Daniel and Elizabeth left North Carolina some time after the birth of their first four children -- Jacob,
Polly, Susannah, and Mary, the latter born in 1804. Later census records of relatives hint that perhaps
the family went next to Kentucky, but if so, it was a stopover of at most two or three years. Then
it was on to Preble County, OH. According to the reference work History of Preble County, Ohio,
1798-1881, Daniel and Elizabeth arrived in 1809, but this does not agree with birth information
concerning fifth child, named Elizabeth after her mother. She was born 25 March 1808 and her
birthplace is listed as Preble County in a number of sources. Most likely the family had reached
Ohio by the end of 1807. Their precise living place for the first few years -- during which time
sixth and seventh children Daniel Jr. and Rosannah came into the world -- is unknown, but a county
property transaction record reveals that Daniel purchased approximately 170 acres of land on 26 March
1813 from a Henry Strader -- this Henry probably being Daniel’s brother. The parcel, consisting of
“the West half of fractional Section of No. 18 Town 8 Range 2 East,” was home to Daniel and Elizabeth
for the rest of their long lives.

Daniel did not get to enjoy the experience of caring for and harvesting
the first crop off his
new land, though, because he left to fight in the War of 1812. The roll of Captain David E. Hendrick’s
Company shows Daniel as serving May 1 to November 18, 1813. He had put in a tour of duty the previous
year as well, and appears on the Roster of Ohio Soldiers of 1812, along with three other Straders.

Daniel survived the war and spent the next forty years as a leading citizen and prominent landowner
of Preble County. The final four children, William, John, Levi, and Jane, were born by 1820 or not
long after. The majority of the eleven kids lived in Preble County lifelong. Most were still local
residents when Daniel passed away 11 February 1853. Elizabeth survived him only a brief while,
expiring 30 August 1855. Husband and wife were both laid to rest in the Sherer Cemetery, Washington
Township, Preble County. Sherer Cemetery had been established as a private graveyard of the Sherer
family and then was expanded to include neighbors and in-laws. Two of Daniel and Elizabeth’s daughters
had married Sherer men.

One of those Sherer/Strader marriages was that of Levi Sherer and Jane Strader. The best
public-source evidence of the composition of the Daniel Strader/Elizabeth Wensck family happens to
take the form of the records of the suit filed by Levi and Jane to force a partition of the
family estate, described as 167 acres, so that the various heirs or their descendants would be able
to get either get their fair share of the money or be able to obtain separate deeds to portions of
the acreage, according to their wishes. Jane was the youngest daughter, and no doubt a suit was the
only way she could get contrary older siblings to do right by her.

One puzzle brought up by the text of Levi and Jane’s petition is its reference to William Strader.
This child of Daniel and Elizabeth does not appear in any other source. The most logical explanation
is that William was an alternate name for John, who is known from other sources, and whose
name does not appear in the petition. This would mean there were only ten known children of
Daniel and Elizabeth, not eleven.

As mentioned, Daniel and Elizabeth’s eldest child was Jacob Strader, born in Guilford County before the
migration, then raised in Preble County from the age of seven or eight onward. He would eventually
become Hannah’s father. The first major step toward that development came with his marriage to Rachel
Starr, daughter of John Starr and Catharine Weitzel. The wedding occurred 1 October 1818 in Preble
County. Groom and bride were both eighteen years old and therefore had
many decades together to look forward to. Before discussing length and breadth of that union, let’s
shift back to the days when Guilford County was first being populated with its Palatinate settlers, and
describe the lives of the grandparents and parents of Rachel Starr.

John Jacob Starr

This individual’s life and identity are sketchy. His sons Adam, Jacob, and John -- all of whom
married women of the same Weitzel family in Guilford County, must have had a father. The naming conventions
of Palatinate families and the continuing use of the name Jacob in subsequent generations gives us the
name John Jacob Starr by inference. The actual form of his name used in source material ranges from
John Jacob to Jacob Starr to John Jacob Stohr -- Stohr probably being the “correct,” non-Americanized
version of the surname.

John Jacob Starr’s father may have been Johannes Starr, age 38, a man who arrived 16 September 1738
in Philadelphia aboard the ship Elizabeth, which had sailed from Rotterdam via Deal, England.
The passenger manifest of heads-of-families includes Johannes as well as three heads of Weitzel
families -- Johann Werner Weitzel (or Weinard Weisell, age 27), Martin Weizel (or Weisell, age 30),
and Henrich Weutsel (or Weitzel or Weisell, age 38). This is persuasive documentation that Johannes
Starr might be the patriarch of the Starrs who settled in Guilford County, because these subsequent
Starrs maintained a close association with the Weitzel clan. If the theory is correct, then Johannes was
among the group of Palatinate German immigrants who stayed in the area of Berks, Lebanon, Schuylkill,
or Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania until about 1750, then travelled down the Emigrant Trail to
North Carolina. However, whether Johannes personally made it to that destination is unknown. His
name does not appear in North Carolina court records. Perhaps he was dead by 1750. Perhaps he stayed
in Pennsylvania. Given the uncertainties, Johannes is regarded as a “maybe” ancestor at this time.

As for “definite” ancestors, the best available within-the-family source for the history of the Starr
family is the material written by his great great granddaughter Mary Rachel Frame Webb, whom we will
call “Rachel Webb” (the name she went by at the end of her life, Webb being the surname of her final
husband) from here to the end of this document. Unfortunately, her account is not particularly
reliable in the matter of John Jacob Starr. In fact, it serves to confuse matters. Rachel Webb
states that Rachel Starr’s maternal grandmother -- this would be Anna Margaret Low, wife of John
Jacob Starr -- arrived in America from Germany as a widow with four boys, landing at
Baltimore. This would mean John Jacob Starr died young. This scenario does not agree with the timing of the
children’s birthdates. An early death also contradicts a theory in the volume Fox Family History
1703-1976 by John F. Vallentine, a reference work that touches repeatedly upon Hannah’s Guilford
County forebears and was used as a guide by Howard Frame in his research. This book points to a record
of the baptism of Adam Starr’s son John Jacob Starr, performed at the Brick Reformed Church in
approximately 1779. The baby’s “sponsors” were his grandparents John Jacob Starr and Anna Margaret Starr.
This implies John Jacob was in attendance to participate in the baptism of his grandson, and therefore
was alive in 1779. However, it is also possible the sponsorship was honorary, a token of respect for a
deceased family patriarch.

Boiling down the available references gives us a birthdate for John Jacob at the end of the 1720s,
probably in Germany rather than the Netherlands. Both he and Anna Margaret Low, who is believed to
have been born in about 1731, came to North Carolina well before 1750, perhaps with the first influx
of their people from Pennsylvania to Guilford County, which dates from 1744. Their wedding must have
occurred in 1749, about a year before the birth of their first child, Adam. These nuptials probably
took place in Guilford County. Altogether five children are known, the youngest born about 1760. Those
five were John Adam Starr (known as Adam), Jacob Starr, John Starr (known as John), Barbara Starr, and
Anna Maria Starr.

You will note that these five include only three boys, not the “four boys” referred to by
Rachel Webb. Webb also stated that the “widow” caused two of her sons to learn the tailor
trade, and two the blacksmith trade. This much may have been somewhat accurate. John Starr
is known to have been a tailor.

These three Starr brothers came of age in North Carolina and appear to have played a meaningful
role in their communities as young men, and are mentioned in various local records of the 1770s through
the early 1800s. In genealogical terms their most noteworthy
accomplishment was that they all, as mentioned above, married daughters of the same family, named
Weitzel. (1) Adam Starr married Margaret Weitzel. They had at least eleven children. Many of this brood
would be part of the migrations from Ohio into Vermilion County, IL. A few went on to Green County, WI.
For example, Adam’s namesake son Adam Starr,
spent the last years of life in Clarno, Green County, WI, no more than a few miles from the home of
his cousin, Rachel Starr Strader. (2) Jacob Starr married Anna Maria Weitzel. They had at least two
children. Jacob is thought to have left Guilford County about 1790, but
his later life has not yet been tracked. (3) John Starr would marry Catharine Weitzel.
This pair would become the parents of Rachel Starr. But before elaborating on their lives, let’s take
one more short step backward, and examine the life of the man who was the father to those three
Weitzel daughters, and father-in-law to the three Starr brothers, the man we will refer to at first
as Heinrich Weitzel:

Heinrich Weitzel

This man was probably the son of the “Henrich Weutsel” who travelled on the H.M.S. Elizabeth and
would probably, as a child, have also been a passenger on that voyage. That was probably the very day he
Americanized his name to Henry. From here on down he will be referred to as Henry Weitzel because it is
more in keeping
with the public records. Those records, from Guilford and nearby counties through 1800, variously
render the surname as Witzel, Wetzel, Weitzell, Whitsel, Whitzel, Whitzell, Whitesell,
Whetsel -- as well as Whitesell and Weitzel. This applies not just to Henry but to many
residents of those counties, most or all of whom were likely to have been members of the same extended
clan. What version Henry himself would give us were he alive to be interviewed today is hard to say.
Weitzel has been arbitrarily chosen as “official” here, though in fact a number of his children
appear to have endorsed the idea that they should make themselves appear more English than German and
were strongly tending to use Whitesell in their later years.

A Brief History of Alamance County reports that the Weitzel family of that region came
from between Nurnberg and Dusseldorf in Germany, resided for about five years in Pennsylvania,
moved to North Carolina in 1750, and settled on Gun Creek. This source (quoted in turn in the
Fox Family History, published by the Fox Family Reunion, Ashland, KS, 1976) goes on to say that,
“This history also confirms (Fox) family tradition in that Adam Weitzel of Orange County (now
Alamance County) was a brother of Henry Weitzel of Guilford County, the two actually residing
only a few miles apart. This relationship for them is probably correct, even though it appears
Adam was probably as much as ten to fifteen years younger than Henry. The area along both sides
of the present Guilford/Alamance County line was settled beginning about 1745 almost exclusively
by Germans. Alamance County was created in 1848, mostly from Orange County, but with a small
portion coming from eastern Guilford County, with later additions from northeastern Chatham
County.”

The above excerpt is the first of many that place Henry (or perhaps his namesake father) in this
particular part of North Carolina.
Below is a map from 1808 that is helpful. Note the place name Weitzel in the upper right, circled
and highlighted in red. This may well have been Henry’s precise place of residence for much of
his life, and if not, was the place other members of his family were living, and he resided close by,
probably just to the east in what was at that time known as Orange County.

As Henry Whitsel, Henry appears on the 1755 tax list of Orange County, which at that time included
an area extending several miles inside present-day Guilford County. By 1762 he was a property owner
along the waters of Alamance in what is now Guilford County. On 22 September 1770 Henry
Weitzel took the oath prescribed by Parliament for naturalization at Hillsborough, Orange
County. Henry (name spelled Weitzell) is recorded in the Brick Reformed Church records as a
donor and collector of monies for the church in 1772. In Guilford County records, Henry is mentioned
at least two dozen more times, including as a juror (1783), an assessor (1783), a purchaser of
land (1762, 1763, twice in 1784, 1787), a recipient of land grants (1779, 1780, 1784, 1787,
1790, 1794), a seller of land (1773, 1785, twice in 1788, 1791, 1792, 1793, 1795), road overseer
(1788), an executor (1791), and as a deceased owner (1797, 1798, 1806). All three Starr sons-in-law
appear in these records, especially Adam Starr. In particular, Adam’s name appears as administrator
of Henry’s estate. The names of Henry’s sons Tobias Weitzel and Henry Weitzel, Jr. also appear
more than once.

Many of the records cited above confirm that Henry was the owner
and operator of a mill along the Reedy Fork of the Haw River, and that he was a property owner along
Beaver Creek. This means he may well have been the owner of the 1770s version of the mill shown at left,
which is located on the Reedy Fork near Beaver Creek. The photo is a modern-day picture of an existing
structure, still in operation and selling its flour not only to the local community but to the tourist
trade. The website of this business does not specifically mention Henry by name in the brief summary it
provides of the mill’s history. (Click here
to visit said website.) However, the possibility this is “the” mill -- rebuilt and slightly relocated --
is too tantalizing to neglect to include the photo here. That possibility aside, it is a fact that Henry's
mill was the site of a colorful historical incident. A minor skirmish of the Revolutionary War, to
become known as the Battle of Whitsell’s Mill, took place in 1781 on Reedy Fork, Guilford County.
British troops decided to occupy and make use of the mill, and local men briefly -- and unsuccessfully --
tried to prevent the seizure of the premises.

None of the available references provide precise birth and death dates for Henry and his wife, nor
the birthdates for the majority of their children, but the following stats seem to be accurate: Henry was
born about 1728, probably in Germany. His wife was Anna Maria Fronich. Some references include the
name Sophronia but this is probably a misrendering of Fronich. She was born about 1729. Whether
she came from the same part of Germany as Henry is unknown. The couple were wed about 1748 in Guilford
County. Their ten children, born from 1749 to 1762, were Petrus, John, Heinrich (Henry, Jr.), Margaret,
Samuel, Catharine, Anna Maria, Elizabeth, Phillip, and Tobias. This is believed to be the birth order.

Intriguingly, Anna Maria Fronich’s name appears on some of the property transaction records mentioned
above. Furthermore it is her maiden name -- or variations of it, usually the Americanized version,
Mary Froney. These documents date from late in the marriage, and do not seem to involve property
that came as part of her dowry, nor can it be explained by widowhood, because she pre-deceased Henry.
Perhaps she took charge of her life more than the typical woman of her era.

Henry and Anna Maria finished their lives in Guilford County. She died in the early 1790s. Henry’s
death can best be determined by letters of administration on the estate of Henry
Whitezel, deceased, issued to Adam Starr, Esquire, in 1797. An estate sale was held and was
reported to the February 1798 court.

The three Starr/Weitzel marriages occurred in the mid-1770s, during Henry’s prime as a landowner,
miller, and man of his community. Adam and Margaret were married 22 April 1773. Jacob and Anna Maria
were next, wed on 5 January 1776, followed less than three weeks later by John and Catharine on 25
January 1776. All three weddings took place in Guilford County. All three couples began having children
immediately, and those offspring arrived at frequent intervals.

John and Catharine were said by Rachel Webb to have had twelve children, but Rachel Webb gave the names of
only seven in her notes, and only three others have been identified from other sources. The missing
two were probably lost at birth or while they were very young. The ten whose identities are known are:
John Henry Starr, Mary Elizabeth Starr, John Barnhart Starr, followed by Sophia, Catherine, Naomi,
Daniel, Margaret, Absalom, and finally Rachel. More than one source agrees that Rachel was the
very youngest, born 23 June 1799.

Rachel was born before her family left Guilford County, but she was not more than ten years old
by the time the household was reestablished in Preble County, OH. It was probably only after getting to
Ohio that she became acquainted with
Jacob Strader. Though both the Strader Family and the Starr and Weitzel families originated in Guilford
County, they seem to have lived in slightly different areas and may not have directly known one another.
In Preble County, however, they were in fairly close proximity. Jacob and Rachel probably met when they
were nine or ten years old. As mentioned above, they wed at age eighteen.

Jacob and Rachel had ten children, the first born nine months after
the wedding and the last coming when Rachel was at the extreme end of her fertile years. These ten, as
they appear in the Jacob Strader family Bible, were Mary Ann Marie (“Polly”) Strader, (b. 20 June 1819),
Susan Anna Strader (b. 29 July 1821), Elizabeth Strader (b. 25 Jan 1824), Anna Catherine Strader (b. 11
May 1826), Hannah Strader (b. 30 June 1829), Margaret Ellen Strader (b. 12 March 1831), Daniel Strader
(b. 11 March 1835), John S. Strader, (b. 22 January 1838), Rhoda Carolyn Strader (b. 25 March 1842), and
Jacob Strader, Jr. (b. 15 November 1844).

Hannah’s known ancestry tree therefore looks like so:

The Birth Family of Hannah Strader

Hannah’s mother Mrs. Rachel Starr Strader in old age

In Preble County, the families mentioned above -- the Straders, the Weitzels, the Starrs, etc. --
began to give in to the great American melting-pot phenomenon. The spouses chosen by the new generations
of the family were often not of German and/or Pennylvania-Dutch extraction. However, this mingling
continued to obey a familiar pattern. The weddings were not just unions of a given man and a given
woman. They were examples of a whole community blending together. Whether the
groom’s forebears had come from the fens of Ireland and the bride’s from the Rhine Valley farmlands of
Germany, the two of them were most likely to have been neighbors for most or all of their lives. Their
families probably all attended the same church. They were almost all dependent on agriculture for
their livelihoods. They were all pioneer,
frontier-dwelling settlers. Often multiple individuals of one immediate family would chose to marry
members of another immediate family, just as the three Starr boys had married the three Weitzel girls. It
was with this Preble County phase that the great mingling of the Strader and the Frame clan
was initiated. The first instance was when Jacob Strader’s sister Polly married Silas Frame in
1821. Twenty-two years later John Strader (who was much younger than Jacob and Polly) would marry Rachel
Frame. By then, the next generation had started to get in on the act, as will be described below. It
is accurate to say that all these people were on a single journey. It was not individuals, but an
entire community, that moved from the Palatinate to the Netherlands in the early 1700s. It was a
mass migration from Europe to North Carolina in the mid-1700s, a common destiny driving the North
Carolina-born generation into Ohio. And the journey was not done. By the late 1820s and early 1830s,
the new generations of these interconnected families would head on Vermilion County, IL. Many would,
in the 1840s and early 1850s, proceed north to the Pecatonica River region -- Stephenson County, IL,
Green County, WI, and Lafayette County, WI.

Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr made the move to
Vermilion County in 1822, joining her sister (Mary) Elizabeth and brother-in-law Henry Johnson and
acquiring a homestead nearby amid a mini-colony of Starr relatives that included not only Lizzy and
Henry, but additional siblings Margaret Marsh (now a widow) and Absalom Starr, and soon to be joined
by Naomi (“Polly”) Jordon and husband John. Coming along with the latter in 1824 were Rachel’s elderly
parents, John Starr and Catharine Weitzel. Twenty-four-year-old Esau Johnson, eldest son of Lizzy and
Henry, served as their guide. The mini-colony may have been the very first settlement in all of what
is now Vermilion County, given that Elizabeth and Henry first occupied their log cabin in 1815. The
locale was known as Johnson’s Point in honor of Henry. That name ceased to be used after the 1830s,
but various sources confirm the cluster of farms lay two miles west of where the village of
Georgetown would eventually rise. All the children from Elizabeth to Daniel were born on the homestead
at Johnson’s Point, and possibly John as well.

After fifteen years, the family gave in to the temptation to go north. In the wake of the Black Hawk
Wars of the early 1830s, northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin were free of Indian aggression and there
were plentiful opportunities to homestead farmland or dig for lead in the mines of Lafayette County. Jacob
and Rachel again journeyed in the wake of Elizabeth and Henry Johnson, proceeding in a large convoy of
oxen-drawn wagons and livestock in the company of various relatives and neighbors. Rachel Webb’s history
provides us with elderly John Starr’s comment to his son-in-law as they were setting out: “Jake, if I
thought you could get coffee in the new country, I’d go with you.”

(It is useful to compare the two images of Rachel Starr Strader you see in this section. The
large one is better quality, scanned from an original tintype in the possession of great great great
grandson Dave Smeds, but the exposure was not the best it could have been. The contrast is so high that
the black lace bonnet Rachel was wearing looks more like a black wig. The details of the bonnet are more
apparent in the image at right. Unfortunately the latter had to be scanned from a snapshot taken in the
early 1970s by
Leah Hastings Schumacher of a framed print hanging on the wall in Florence Mauermann Behrens’s home
and not from an original -- note the glare from the flashbulb on the
glass. However, a better scan will soon replace this one, now that the original framed print has been
located.)

Jacob and Rachel, along with many of the other members of their travelling party, settled at first in
Stephenson County at Waddams Grove. (In the 1884 History of Green County, Wisconsin, the
Straders were said to have first come to the place known as Richland Timber, but this is unfortunately
no longer a useful place reference, as the term has fallen completely out of use, and seems to have
applied to a long stretch of woodland, rather than an individual settlement.) Jacob and Rachel’s
immediate neighbors there included Lizzy and Henry Johnson, and two of Rachel’s double first cousin
Adam Starr’s grown sons, Henry Starr and Levi Starr. The latter were brothers-in-law of Esau Johnson,
Esau having married his double second cousin Saloma (“Sally”) Starr.

In about 1845, not long after the birth of Jacob, Jr.,
the family established a new farm over the border in Green County, WI in Jordan Township. Among the
bachelors frequenting Stephenson and Green Counties in the late 1840s was Nathaniel
Martin, who would soon take notice of Hannah, or vice versa. (For more on that, proceed to Hannah’s
biography page. Click here to go straight there.)

Because Jacob and Rachel and their children established themselves in Wisconsin as a unit, Hannah’s
kin were around her as an adult to a greater degree than her husband’s kin were around him. Several
of Nathaniel’s siblings never came west from Virginia at all, and his parents only arrived when they
were elderly. By contrast, all of Hannah’s siblings spent years in or near Green County. Some
finished their lives there. Parents Jacob and Rachel passed away in Green County as well, beginning
with Jacob 28 February 1865. Jacob was buried in Kelly Cemetery (sometimes called Kelly/Franklin
Cemetery) in Cadiz Township. Rachel thereafter lived with one or another of her children. The 1870
census shows her in the household of son John and his young family on his farm in Clarno Township. In
1880, she is with widowed daughter Rhoda and Rhoda’s two daughters in Cadiz Township a bit north of
Martintown. Her nephew Esau Johnson wrote of visiting her there in May, 1880 -- as he put it, it was
the first time he had seen his aunt (who was only one year older than Esau) in 53 years. Esau had
left Vermilion County for good in 1827. Rachel survived her husband
by more than two dozen years, finally passing away in Martintown 8 March 1889 at just under ninety
years of age. Her remains were also laid to rest at Kelly Cemetery. Jacob and Rachel share a grave
and a tombstone. (The gravemarker is shown at left. Photo taken by Robert Carpenter 1993. Note that
this gravemarker is relatively new. The original marker is nearby. It is not in good condition and
some descendant -- probably Florence Mauermann Behrens -- must have been motivated to commission a
replacement that would remain legible into the 21st Century and beyond.)

While it is not possible to describe the entire line of descent of Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr with
the sort of attention that has been devoted to Hannah’s family, what you see below is hopefully a good
start. Hannah survived until 1919 so she would have been aware of much of the information, and it feels
right to have it here. Please be aware that this section is a work-in-progress. From 2005 to the end of
2014, each of Hannah’s siblings only received a paragraph or two of coverage. Now there is more, with
the added goal of saying at least something about each of her nieces and nephews. Eventually this
material will be more than just a section on the page about her ancestry, and will have its own
dedicated page. However, that will take some time to complete. As of now (April, 2015), you will not
see the expanded coverage about the children of Hannah’s sisters Elizabeth, Anna Catherine, and
Margaret. That will come later. Meanwhile it didn’t seem right to hold the rest back.

Mary Ann Marie “Polly” Strader

Mary Ann Marie “Polly” Strader was perhaps the
sibling who had the most impact on Hannah’s life. In a way this is surprising because Polly was a full ten
years older than Hannah and was gone from the bevy of the family home by the time Hannah was seven to eight
years old. The two siblings did not get the chance to spend much time together as adults until the mid-1850s
when Polly settled on a farm less than ten miles from Martintown. After that, though, Polly and/or her
family members maintained regular and extended contact. A number of
Polly’s children and grandchildren would go on to have a week-by-week presence in Hannah’s life. Of all the
lines that spring from Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr, it is Polly’s clan that today is represented in
the greatest proportion in Green County, WI or spots nearby -- and this was the case to an even greater
degree during Hannah’s lifetime. (By contrast, Hannah probably never again laid eyes on her sister Susanna
or any member of Susanna’s family from 1853 onward.) Polly was also one of the longest-lived of the
Strader/Starr offspring and therefore Hannah was able to spend time with her oldest sister
right up into the 20th Century, something true of only two other siblings, both much younger than Hannah.

Frustratingly, even though Polly and her descendants were so well known to Hannah herself, a number of
questions have developed in the past hundred years about Polly and her story. One uncertainly is to what
degree Polly embraced her nickname. She is called Polly in old family notes and is described as Polly in
the probate file paperwork created in 1852 and 1853 during the interval when her late first husband’s
estate was being settled. But she appears in virtually all other documents under an array of other names
including Mary, Mary Ann, Anna, and Marie. We will continue to call her Polly here, but this is not to be
taken as a declaration of her “true” identity.

One of the most authoritative sources about Polly in recent years was her great-granddaughter Florence
Mauermann Behrens (1910-2000). Florence, a former schoolteacher, became a dedicated historian and family
researcher. She served the town of Brodhead, Green County, WI as chair of the mayor’s historical
preservation committee and she oversaw the efforts of the Brodhead library history room even in the 1990s
when she was quite elderly. This means Florence was skilled as a genealogist and succeeded in finding out
facts about Polly that eluded others. Moreoever, Florence was the heir of Polly’s own personal
papers, which Florence inherited from her mother Oma (Naoma) Whitehead Mauermann, who had them from her mother
Rhoda Cathryn Frame Whitehead. Unfortunately, even Florence did not have all the answers about Polly and
her life. And even more unfortunate, Florence did not survive long enough to serve as a direct
consultant when this website began to be assembled in 2005.

Polly was already in her late teens by the time of the big family migration from Vermilion County to
Stephenson County. She came along on the trip, but in fact she may not have done so as a daughter of Jacob
and Rachel, but as a wife of William Swearingen. The latter may even have been one of the influences that
caused Jacob and Rachel to move. Jacob and Rachel knew they could depend once again on the
anchoring presence of Elizabeth and Henry Johnson, but their new son-in-law William had already visited
Stephenson County. William, a son of Daniel Swearingen and Lydia Peters born to that couple in Kentucky
30 September 1816, was a river trader. During the early to mid-1830s as a teenager and young man,
he had made a number of runs between the more settled parts of southeastern Illinois and the
newly-opened-for-settlement lands in northwestern Illinois and southern Wisconsin Territory. (The latter
did not actually exist in the jurisdictional sense when William began these journeys; it was part of Michigan
Territory through 1836.) Assuming
William recommended the Pecatonica River region as a fresh place for his new parents-in-law to live, that
may have been the final endorsement Jacob and Rachel needed in order to make up their minds.

Florence Behrens’s notes say Polly and William were wed 24 September 1837 in Stephenson County. This date
and place seem credible, but there is a statistical conflict that must be taken into account. Florence
lists the couple’s first child as Susannah Swearingen, born 7 February 1837, died 12 March 1844 in Vermilion
County. This birthdate is before the wedding date. Perhaps the wedding actually took place 24 September
1836, a date which would imply the ceremony occurred in Vermilion County, not in Stephenson. Perhaps the
birthdate was actually 7 February 1838. Either of those changes would put the birth after the wedding. Four
and a half months prior, actually. This would have meant Polly was pregnant as a bride. This is believable.
What is not as credible is the idea that Susannah was born out of wedlock. The Straders were religious
enough that this would not have been an acceptable scenario and it is not likely things happened that way.
There are two other possibilities: 1) William may have been a recent widower when he married Polly, with
Susannah being the product of a brief marriage to a woman who died in childbirth. However, this theory has
no evidence to support it. 2) Susannah may not have existed. Florence may have found records of a Susannah
Swearingen with that birthdate and death date in cemetery records of Fischer Graveyard in Covington,
Vermilion County, IL and decided she must have been Polly and William’s daughter. It is possible Polly and
William only had five children. Florence is pretty much the only source for the extra pair. The five whose
existence is unquestioned consist of Mary Jane, born in 1838 or 1839, Lydia Elizabeth, born
13 December 1842, Rachael, born 25 December 1844, Sarah Jane, born about 1846, and William Henry Swearingen
(possibly a junior), born 23 June 1848. Florence included Susannah and one other
child who died before reaching adulthood. She names that last child as Isaac, born about 1848, and Florence
says he died at the age of twelve or thirteen of an intestinal complaint caused by “green apples.”
While traces of Susannah can be found -- an example being the 1840 census which shows the William Swearingen
household contained two little girls who would correspond to Susannah and Mary Jane -- there is no
confirmation Isaac ever existed. He is not in the household in the 1850 census, for example.

The children, whether there were five or seven, were not all born in the same home. William’s occupation
must have required him to keep seeking new opportunities. Mary Jane was born somewhere in Wisconsin. In
1840, as shown by the census, the family home was in Stephenson County near the Strader homestead. Once
the children were more numerous and more mobile,
though, a steadier arrangement would have become vital, and it would appear that Polly and William chose
Vermilion County as their base of operations -- or at least, they were there more often than anywhere else.
They were enumerated there in the 1850 census. Polly is unique among the children of Jacob Strader and
Rachel Starr in coming back to the family’s former stomping grounds. Her parents and siblings never resided
there after the 1836-37 exodus.

William Swearingen died 8 June 1852 in Vermilion County. Now a single mother, Polly did the natural thing
and sought the refuge of her parents in Green County. This brought her back into the same social circle
as her siblings. Her need for another husband and breadwinner was obvious and she did not remain a widow
long. However, her second marriage was not successful. Her niece Juliette Martin Savage wrote in 1947 that
Polly “only lived with her second husband a short time.” Florence Behrens notes this marriage was to a man
named Starr or Blair, but apparently Florence was unable to learn anything more about the fellow than these
two possible surnames. Both names are intriguing and are cause to wonder if Florence got her facts right.
The name Starr suggests Polly married a Starr cousin. Certainly there were Starr second cousins in the area
who might have been the source of such a groom. The name Blair suggests she may have wed an uncle of
Adelaide Blair, the eventual bride of Polly’s brother John Starr Strader. There is a possible date and place
for this wedding -- 24 November 1853 in Cadiz Township (probably in Martintown). In some family notes
this date and place is used in association with William Swearingen’s death, but the 1852/Vermilion County
stats seem to be accurate, meaning the 24 November 1853 date must have some other reason to have been
jotted down. The timing and place sound right for Polly’s second set of nuptials. All that can be said for
sure about the second marriage is that it was brief. It seems likely that it ended with an annulment
rather than a divorce.

Polly went on to marry Silas Frame 31 October 1855 in Argyle, Lafayette County, WI. This union was one
of the six Strader/Frame marriages referred to at the top of this page, and part of a trio involving three
of Hannah’s sisters and a set of three Frame brothers. The marriage of Polly and Silas is not to be
confused with one that occurred a generation earlier when Silas Frame, an uncle of the three Frame
brothers, became the husband of Jacob Strader’s sister Polly Strader. Yes, that means that for two
generations in a row, a Silas Frame married a Polly Strader! Sorting out which is which is sometimes a
genealogical challenge unless one pays attention to the dates and places. The older Silas Frame/Polly
Strader pair lived out their lives in Preble County, OH. The younger pair established themselves as
newlyweds on a farm in Clarno Township, Green County, WI and stayed put. Silas in fact died on that
farm in 1894, after which Polly spent most of her final years there.

Though Polly came to her marriage to Silas at over thirty-five years of age, she had an additional four
children. They were Jacob Strader, born in 1856, Rhoda Cathryn, born 10 January 1858, Ellen, born in the
spring of 1860, and Emma Frame, born 22 November 1861. That means Polly was the mother of at least nine,
and possibly eleven, biological children. Impressive as that is, it is only a fraction of the mothering
she did. She was the foster mother of several of her grandchildren. Her daughter Mary Jane died in the
early 1870s. Within a dozen years four more such tragedies would follow. Lydia, Sarah, and William
Swearingen would perish in their thirties, and Jacob Strader in his twenties. In her 1947 letter, Juliette
Savage stated that all of these first cousins of hers died of tuberculosis. All these five except Jacob
Strader Frame produced children before they expired. Polly and Silas came to the rescue
time and time again. They accepted full custody of grandsons Silas Edward Trickle and Ashford Lewis
Trickle. Several other grandchildren spent substantial periods in their home until their surviving
parents had remarried and were able to handle the responsibility.

Polly was widowed again by the death of Silas in 1894. She stayed put in her home for a few years,
then spent the last fragment of her life residing with her daughter Rhoda and son-in-law Charles E.
Whitehead on their Clarno Township farm, and perished there at ten o’clock in the morning of 27 June
1905 about four weeks after a severe collapse of health brought on by old age. She was eighty-six years
old. Of her siblings, only Hannah would surpass that mark. She was buried with Silas in Kelly/Franklin
Cemetery. (Gravemarker shown above left.)

Polly’s offspring were, as a group, probably more a part of Hannah’s life than any other set of nieces and
nephews. Here is a summary of each of their lives (not counting Susannah and Isaac Swearingen, in view of
the fact that they may not have existed):

Mary Jane Swearingen married Loren Brewster Devoe 4 April 1861 in Clarno Township. They became
parents of three children -- William Carlos, Charles Henry, and Cordella (aka Della) -- in the 1860s. In
the early 1870s the couple moved to a farm in Cadiz Township in the vicinity of Martintown, where Mary
Jane soon passed away, becoming the first of Polly’s children to be taken by tuberculosis. Loren lingered
in and/or near Martintown for many years to come,
marrying a second and then a third wife and siring a son with each. Hannah was particularly well acquainted
with her grand nephew Charles Henry Devoe, who made Martintown his base for nearly the whole of the span
during which he and his wife Fannie Long raised their eleven children. (And when they weren’t based in
Martintown, they were only a few miles away in Browntown). The Swearingen-Devoe branch has tended to remain in
Wisconsin more than other parts of the Strader/Starr clan, many of the others having abandoned the area
quite early on. Even today Charles’s great-grandson Duane Devoe lives only a dozen miles from Martintown.
(Duane is one of the modern-day relatives who has contibuted information for this website.) Mary Jane's
son William Carlos Devoe was an exception, leaving for Iowa as a young man and then spending his final
decades in Missouri. Loren Brewster Devoe survived until 1916, passing away in Waterloo, IA, having spent
his final few years with his youngest son (by third wife Ariel Howe) George Loren Devoe.

Lydia Swearingen married Robert Edward Trickle,
Jr. (aka Trickel). The couple spent their marriage farming in Green County. Lydia, too, would die of TB,
but she did not succumb until the latter part of the 1870s when she was almost forty years old, so hers
was a very substantial brood -- much more so than her siblings and half-siblings. She gave birth to ten
known children, having had an early start on marriage, becoming a wife in 1859 as a teenager. (Shown at
right is Lydia and Robert in what must be their wedding portrait -- and it is literally a portrait, as in
an artist's rendering and not a photograph. In 1859 Green County, they would have found it easier to have
the image created by an artist than by a photographer.) Two of her elder sons, William and Perry,
married nieces of Loren Devoe. Another of Loren’s nieces married into the Lockman family of Martintown.
The Trickel/Devoe/Lockman clan has been robustly researched by
modern-day descendants including Duane Devoe and as a consequence much of the line of Polly
Strader Swearingen Frame is unusually well defined in recent genealogies. Once Lydia passed away, Robert
found it impossible to care for all of such a large group of children. He sent a couple of the younger
girls into fosterage while younger sons Silas Edward Trickle and Ashford Lewis Trickle were taken in by
Polly and Silas. Robert moved as a widower to Delta County, CO accompanied by or soon joined by sons John,
Perry, Andrew Jackson (Jack), and William. Some did not go quite as far, ending up instead in Dodge City,
Ford County, KS. Younger members of the brood found the Colorado and Kansas options less compelling,
perhaps feeling (rightly so) that they had been left behind. Ashford, after coming of age back in
Wisconsin, chose to settle in Iowa instead. Nellie Mae, the very youngest of Lydia’s offspring, did spend
a few decades in Colorado, but finished her life in California.

Rachael Swearingen married Carlos J. Wells in late 1861. They immediately settled down on a farm in
Rock Grove Township, Stephenson County, IL. That was where the couple spent the rest of their long lives.
They produced four children -- William Warner, John E., Cora Ellen, and Lura Ann Wells -- at the sensible
pace of about one child every five years. They also took in Olive Wolf, daughter of Rachael’s late half-sister
Emma Frame, when Olive was a teenager (perhaps simply to have a servant, as she is described in the 1900
census, or perhaps to let the girl get out of her stepmother’s house). Carlos was apparently popular within
the clan. A number of Rachael’s nephews and grand-nephews were named Carlos (usually as a middle name) and
he seems to have been the source. Carlos died in 1917. Rachael remained on the farm, which was in the hands
of daughter Cora and son-in-law David Rockey. Rachael died in the mid-1920s -- the only one of Polly’s kids
to come close to matching the number of years Polly herself survived. By the time of her death Rachael had
been a fixture of Stephenson County for over sixty years. Her clan would carry on that connection and even
today descendants inhabit the area. As for her kids, John and Cora remained within the county for life.
William Warner Wells and family eventually relocated to DeKalb County, but in the grand scheme of things
this was not a big shift. He and his household ended up only thirty miles southeast of the old farm in easy
visiting distance. The only one who truly left was Lura Ann Wells, who with her husband Owen Reed moved to
South Dakota in the early 1900s. Her three Reed grandchildren were the only ones Rachael did not get the
chance to see on a regular basis.

Sarah Jane Swearingen took a page from her mother’s book and went through a marriage that was over
so quickly it is difficult nowadays to confirm it happened. She wed neighbor Thomas Hackworth 12 March 1865
in Clarno Township. Divorce or annulment must have followed because both Sarah and Thomas appear in the 1870
census married to other people. In Sarah’s case, her second spouse was Stephen Decatur Black. (Called Dick
Black in Juliette Savage’s 1947 letter -- apparently he was nicknamed “Deck” and inevitably some people
started calling him Dick instead. (Because of this nickname, a few pre-internet genealogies identified him
as Richard Black.) Sarah and Stephen were wed 19 September 1868 in Green County, WI. Precisely seven weeks
later, Sarah’s younger brother William H. Swearingen married Stephen’s younger sister Hulda D. Black. The
two Black siblings were children of David W. Black and Nancy Cable.

As newlyweds, Sarah and Stephen moved in with his parents in rural Cadiz Township near Martintown. David
and Nancy Black had founded their farm in the 1860s after the family had come out west from Tuscawaras
County, OH. Stephen was the eldest son (by quite a margin) and was his father’s right-hand man in
caring for the land, which he did throughout the time Sarah was his wife. The couple produced three
children: Nancy, Rachel, and Ernest, the first born in 1869 and the last in 1879. It was while Ernest was
an infant that Sarah’s case of tuberculosis manifested in full force. Leaving her husband and two older
children at the Black farm -- no doubt in order to lessen the chance that they would contract the
disease -- she retreated to the sanctuary of her mother and stepfather’s home in Clarno Township, where
she passed away in the spring of 1880. Stephen raised the kids back in Cadiz Township before he died in
1898. Because of the proximity, Hannah got to know her niece’s offspring quite well. Nancy and Rachel
Black went on to spend the rest of their lives in Green County. (Ernest Black moved away to Minnesota in
early adulthood.)

William Henry Swearingen and Hulda Black would eventually make a similar move to Cadiz Township, but
not until a few years into the marriage. They farmed at first in Clarno Township, staying more-or-less
within the sphere of Polly and Silas Frame. First child Anna was born in Clarno Township. In the early 1870s
the family spent a short sojourn in Hardin County, IA. Second child William Carlos was born there. By the
middle of the decade (and possibly sooner) William and Hulda decided the Martintown area appealed to them.
The family lingered about twenty-five years, though William did not live to see the end of that phase because
he succumbed to TB 7 November 1883 at the age of only thirty-five. By then the family had expanded to six,
the four younger ones consisting of Stephen, Elsie May, Cora Ellen, and Lee Henry (sometimes Henry Lee)
Swearingen. Hulda went on to marry Orville Hubbard in 1891. The ties to Martintown weakened with the late
1890s deaths of
Hulda’s parents and her brother Stephen. Older son William Carlos Swearingen had just become established in
Mazomanie, Dane County, WI, so Hulda and Orville -- who was eighteen years Hulda’s senior and was ready to
retire -- also moved to Mazomanie. The two would finish their lives there, Orville dying in 1927 and
Hulda in 1933. Two of her other children, Elsie and Lee, also put down roots in Mazomanie. Descendants can
be found in Mazomanie to this day.

Jacob Strader Frame accompanied his brother-in-law Robert Trickle to Delta County, CO in 1880.
Jacob was by then in his mid-twenties. He is not known to have married or become a father. In the 1947
letter, Juliette Savage includes Jacob on the list of the cousins who died of tuberculosis; however, a
conflicting note written in the early 1910s by his double first cousin Rachel Webb states Jacob drowned
in Colorado.

Rhoda Cathryn Frame was the child upon whom Polly came to lean at the end of her life. In some ways
this was inevitable. With the exception of Rachael Swearingen Wells, no other child of Polly survived past
the mid-1880s. Rhoda was born in 1858 and spent her whole upbringing on the Clarno Township farm. In 1877,
she wed Charles Edward Whitehead. The Whiteheads as a whole share a number of other genealogical ties
to the Martin/Strader clan, but this union was the most direct example of the connection. The pair settled
as newlyweds on a Clarno Township farm not too far from Polly and Silas’s property, but far enough to have
a bit of a cushion between them. This farm was to be their home for all of Rhoda’s remaining forty-six years
of life, after which Charles lingered there until retiring in his mid-seventies (in 1929 or 1930). Rhoda
and Charles produced just three children, a son who died either at birth or in infancy, and two daughters,
Blanch and Naoma. They also get credit for raising Rhoda’s first cousin Benjamin Franklin Eveland from the
age of eleven to adulthood. (For more on that, see the Margaret Strader section below.) Rhoda and Charles
took in elderly Polly at about the turn of the century, within half a dozen years after the death of Silas
Frame. The old widow would remain until death. Rhoda was one of the lucky ones to avoid
tuberculosis and whatever other misfortunes claimed so many of her generation,
but in the end her luck ran out. While visiting her daughter Blanch 12 November 1923, Rhoda stepped off a
curb in Brodhead, WI. Her eight-year-old grandson, Ralph Roderick, spotted an on-coming automobile in time
to leap back out of the way, but Rhoda was struck. She died almost instantly.

Ellen Frame appears in the 1860 census at the age of two months, proof that her birth was in March
or April of 1860. Florence Behrens’s notes say Ellen died in infancy.

Emma Frame was Polly’s last biological (as opposed to fostered) child, born 22 November 1861 in
Clarno Township. She probably did not feel as though she was the youngest, though, given how many nephews
and nieces shared the home during her childhood. In late 1882, Emma married Charles E. Wolf, son of Michael
Wolf and Hester Cable. Both the Wolf clan and the Cable clan be linked to the Martin-Strader clan in
multiple ways, the most clear-cut example being the 1908 wedding of Charles Wolf’s nephew Tecumseh Edgar
Claus to Hannah’s granddaughter Blanche Bucher. Emma and Charles do not appear to have established their
own home as newlyweds. Instead they boarded with Polly and Silas and Charles helped his elderly stepfather
keep up the farm. Emma may in fact have never known any other home than the one she was born into, because
she died 21 December 1886 at only twenty-five years old. She left behind two little girls, Olive Mary Wolf
and Esther Verdi Wolf. Charles went on to marry Lora Earlywine in 1891 and produced four sons with her. He
spent the latter portion of his life in Rock Run Township, Stephenson County, IL among his kinfolk, passing
away 10 October 1933. He spelled his last name Wolfe during the final quarter century of his life.

Susan Anna Strader

Susan Anna Strader was born 29 July 1821 and was
the only child other than Polly to be born in Preble County. She was still an infant when the family moved
to Vermilion County. She was almost old enough at the time of the subsequent migration to Stephenson County
to have become a wife. Had that development taken place at that point, she might not have come along on the
migration at all, and her life story would be quite different than it is. Instead she remained with her
parents and siblings well into her twenties. She finally wed when she was about twenty-six years old.
That means she was the “old maid” of the family, given that her sisters were between sixteen and twenty-three
years old at the time they first became wives.

Susan will be called Susanna for the rest of this essay. That was apparently a nickname, meaning of course
that it is equally valid to spell it Susannah with an “h” on the end. Indeed, she is recorded as Susanna in
the 1850, 1860, and 1870 censuses, and is Susannah in cemetery/death records. However, the name is Susan Anna
Strader in the formal
genealogical lists of the Strader-Starr family that originate with more than one of her nieces, and it is
Susan in a small number of other independent sources, so Susan Anna Strader was probably her real name, even
though she had a younger sister who had “Anna” as one of her names.

Susanna’s husband was Peter Pence Hughes, son of David Hughes and Sarah Margaret “Peggy” Pence. He was even
more of a pioneer to southeastern Wisconsin than was Susanna. Born in Licking County, OH in about 1817, his
father had died in approximately 1823 soon after a move to Illinois. His mother Peggy went on to
wed Samuel Asher Townsend, who was turning forty at about that time and already had eight children from his
first marriage and a couple more from a brief second marriage. Samuel was among the very first men to come
to the lead-mining region, travelling there in 1827 with a couple of his elder sons and settling at first
at Gratiot’s Grove -- meaning he surely rubbed shoulders with Esau Johnson and other early-arriving members
of the Starr clan. In 1828, the women and smaller children of the Townsend family joined Samuel. That group
included Peggy and of course Peter, who was still only about eleven years old. During the next half a dozen
years, as Peter proceeded through his teens, the family seems to have lived variously at Gratiot’s Grove,
Shullsburg, Mineral Point, and Dodgeville, i.e. within what is now Lafayette County and Iowa County, WI.

In the 1830s, Samuel and Peggy became based in Jo Daviess County, IL, but Peter does not appear to have
gone along -- nor for that matter do any of the Hughes kids seem to have done so. Peter instead was part of
the household of his older sister Susan and brother-in-law Joshua Tatman Bailey. The latter were wed at
Mineral Point in early 1833. As far as can be determined, the Baileys spent the rest of the 1830s and much
of the 1840s residing in Iowa County, probably near Dodgeville. By cleaving so closely to his sister and her
family, Peter might be
regarded as the male equivalent of an old maid. He was in his early thirties when he managed to venture
south into Green County and lingered in Jordan Township long enough to become acquainted with Susanna -- or
perhaps Susanna, who was old enough to roam in search of employment, ventured up to Iowa County and met
Peter there. The pair found themselves to be suitable, and became spouses in approximately 1847. Unfortunately
their precise wedding date and place has not turned up in any source.

In 1848, Susanna gave birth to her first child, Elias Hughes. By the spring of 1849, she was pregnant again.
This would lead to the birth of son Peter Pence Hughes, Jr. That, however, was a birth that the elder Peter
may not have been on-hand to witness. In 1849 and 1850, huge numbers of young men poured out of Wisconsin in
order to take part in the Gold Rush in California. Peter was among them. Whether he departed in 1849 or in
early 1850 has yet to be determined. It is however extremely likely he went with his brother-in-law
Joshua Bailey. The latter’s journey is well-documented and definitely occurred in 1849. Joshua brought along
his young sons Joel and Joseph. They reached Placerville, CA 10 September 1849. Joshua and the boys then
remained in Placerville for more than a year before proceeding in late 1850 to White Rock Spring in Sacramento
County, then half a year later up to Siskiyou County, and finally voyaging back by way of Panama to arrive back
in Wisconsin by early 1853. Because Joshua had the youngsters to consider, he lodged with them in a hotel in
Placerville, probably fearing the conditions in the mining camps would be too rough for his sons. Peter on the
other hand was unencumbered. He apparently headed out into the hills, making his independent attempt to best
utilize his time out West. Just where he went is unclear, in part because he is not recorded in the 1850
census. The Baileys do appear in that source occupying their quarters at the hotel, but Peter is not shown with
them. He may have been in a mining camp that no census enumerator managed to reach. Or he may have already been
in-transit back to Wisconsin. The 1850 census was collected late in quite a few areas of the United States. The
data about the Baileys and the other denizens of Placerville was collected on the 25th of October, 1850. Peter
is known to have returned to Wisconsin on a separate journey from his brother-in-law and departed at least a
year prior. Peter’s presence in Wisconsin by the autumn of 1851 is evident from the fact that he and Susanna
conceived their third child, Rachel Anna Hughes, that season. It stands to reason he may no longer have been
in California as of late October, 1850.

While her husband was absent, Susanna took shelter with her parents in Jordan Township. She is enumerated there
in the 1850 census along with her young sons. Also there at that time was her sister Margaret with her
baby son Millard Fillmore Eveland -- because Margaret’s husband James Henry Eveland was another man who had caught
gold fever. Enumerated on the same page is the household of Peter Hughes’s younger brother William Hughes, so
it was not quite an “all Strader” scene.

Joshua Bailey came back full of enthusiasm over the potential for a permanent life in California. His notion was
treated seriously. Joshua not only convinced his wife they should move their immediate family out, but persuaded a
number of others to be part of the grand enterprise, Peter and Susanna among them. Oh, to have been a fly on the
wall as he made his case. Joshua was talking about a move of 2400 miles, a journey through territory most of
which was still in the control of native tribes, to a spot that had not even been part of the nation five years
earlier. And everyone who went would be leaving behind nearly everyone they had ever known. It must have been
quite a sales pitch.

Members of the Bailey family happen to have been profiled in at least two books written in the late 19th Century
concerning the pioneer era of the Sacramento Valley. Because many of those family members were still alive at
the time, the writers were able to conduct interviews and obtain information about them first-hand, and we today
are in the lucky position of having that material to shine a light on details about Susanna and Peter’s crossing
of the continent. The prime source is An Illustrated History of Sacramento County, California by the
Honorable Win J. Davis, published in 1890 by the Lewis Publishing Company. Here is an excerpt from the section
on Joshua Tatman Bailey that describes the 1853 journey: “His [Joshua’s] wife and two daughters, and Mrs.
Bailey’s sister-in-law, Susan Hughes, came with a party of twenty-two men, bringing with them some large heavy
stock, such as horses, oxen, mules, and cattle, also seven wagons to hold provisions; as soon as one wagon was
emptied they discarded it. They were seven months in coming across, having to stop in order to allow their cattle
to feed by the way.” Instead of “twenty-two men” the author may have meant, “twenty-two others” because
the party was composed not just of the four women and a group of men, but several small children as well. Elias
Hughes was only five years old, Peter P. Hughes, Jr. was only three. Rachel Hughes was a baby. Several of the
Baileys were quite young, including little Sarah Eleanor “Nellie” Bailey, age four, who was finally getting the
opportunity to become acquainted with her father, whose initial trip west had taken him away from her either
while she was still in the womb, or at most only a couple of months old.

Susanna, her husband’s two nieces (Belle Bailey and Rachel Ann Bailey, both in their late teens at the time of
the journey), and her sister-in-law Susan were singled out in the text because so very few women (of good
reputation) had yet made their way to the Mother Lode region. The travellers were descending upon a part of
California that had not been developed by the Spanish or Mexican colonialists. In terms of instilling a
European-American-based way of life to the locale, Susanna was a true pioneer. This is not necessarily a label
that applied to the miners who preceded her. Many of those men were opportunists with no plan to remain once they
completed their attempts at fortune-hunting. They didn’t bring culture as much as they brought greed.
Susanna on the other hand came with her family, the livestock, the household furnishings, and most important,
the intention to stay and transform the setting into a lasting home. Susanna had already been an
early-on-the-scene pioneer three times -- first as an infant arriving in Vermilion County, second as a
teenager proceeding to Stephenson County, and third as an unmarried young woman coming to Jordan Township.
This fourth time was character-definitive. She wasn’t just tagging along. Her role was active. If she’d put
her foot down, she and Peter would have stayed put. Susanna’s choice to head west into the unknown showed
her genuine nature. The action epitomized the sort of trailblazing that members of the Starr clan had
exhibited so often in the preceding hundred years. Susanna is unique in that way among the children of Jacob
Strader and Rachel Starr. Her siblings all spent the majority of their lives in the Pecatonia River region.
Susanna by contrast spent barely more than fifteen years there, from the arrival at Waddams Grove until her
departure in 1853.

Immediately upon arriving the Baileys decided where they wanted to settle, and did so quickly, building a
house and moving into it in 1854. Their chosen site was in Brighton Township in Sacramento County out in the
great Central Valley. The place would be known to locals as Sloughhouse. It lay along Jackson Road, already an
established traffic corridor through the area and which remains so even today, though now it is often
better known as Route 16. It is the most direct route for modern-day denizens of Sacramento to head off
for the weekend to the wineries and bed-and-breakfast inns of Amador County. Susanna and Peter however
rejected the opportunity to settle beside their kinfolk. It could be that seven dust-eating months of
constant association hour after hour day after day was more togetherness than they could stomach. While
there are sufficient indications that Peter and his sister and their respective families kept in touch
over the decades to come, on the whole they were content to forge separate destinies.

Susanna and Peter settled instead many miles upstream (the “stream” being the Cosumnes River) in the
foothills in Cosumnes Township in El Dorado County. The easiest way to get an impression of their place
of residence is to look on Mapquest for the community of Fair Play. The Hughes home was either very close
to or actually within the boundaries of the village, which though it is very tiny now, grew to as many
as three thousand residents in its Gold Rush prime. They are likely to have kept the same house, or at
least the same house lot, throughout their tenure, which lasted into the early 1870s. There is unfortunately
no documentation to confirm precisely when in the 1850s that tenure began, but there is every reason
to assume the couple and their offspring were in place by 1854 or even as early as the very end of
1853. As parents, Susanna and Peter surely wanted to provide their little ones with a sense of permanence,
particularly after the upheaval of the long wagon-train journey. They are therefore unlikely to have spent
a lot of time checking out alternate places to put down roots. Cosumnes Township may have been an area
Peter had come to know during 1849 and 1850, and was the target the family was aiming for from the moment
they hitched up their oxen to their wagon in Wisconsin. Susanna and Peter were therefore
pioneers of Fair Play. The earliest settlers of the immediate vicinity are regarded by historians as
being A. Sisson and Charles W. Staples, whose arrival can be pinpointed to the year 1853. (Charles
Staples appears in the Fair Play enumeration section in the 1860 and 1870 censuses. In both instances, his
entry is just three pages away from that of the Hughes family.)

Fair Play was a savvy choice of venue given that Peter appears to have decided mining would be his
career. Chances are high he had been a lead miner back in Wisconsin. He knew the mining life, and knew
that it suited his skill set and his inclinations. He would have understood the potential of Cosumnes
Township. In other areas of the Mother Lode, gold could be found only in its placer form, i.e. as dust,
flakes, and nuggets rinsed downstream. The early prospectors had depended upon that easily-obtained
type, but already by 1853, the sources were becoming depleted. The rock formations of Cosumnes Township
on the other hand contained primary gold deposits -- gold still in the vein. It had to be chiselled and
blasted out of the ground, and knocked apart from the quartz in which it was embedded. The downside was,
that process took infrastructure and capitalization. The upside was, the exploitation of the deposits often
went on for many years at a stretch and supported a stable local economy. And for Peter, the situation
was even better because he “got in on the ground floor” in an area that had not here-to-fore been
heavily exploited. Fair Play remained a good place to be all the way through the 1860s. Even in the
early 1880s there was still one stamping mill in operation in the vicinity.

Susanna and Peter had conceived another child during the wagon-train journey: Jacob Strader Hughes, born
within six months of the arrival in California. It’s quite possible a cluster of births followed,
but only two are known to posterity. The babies were David Hughes and Catherine G. Hughes, better known as
Katie. David appears in the 1860 census as a one-year-old child. He does not reappear in the 1870 census
and therefore must have died young. His grave was surely in Cosumnes Township but details are not
known at this time. If Susanna and Peter buried one child during their years at Fair Play, it is quite
possible they buried others, given how common it was in that era to lose children at birth or in early
infancy. They may have viewed themselves as fortunate that five of their children -- Elias, Peter, Jr.,
Rachel, Jacob, and Katie -- reached adulthood. Four of those five spent the greater part of their
childhood in Cosumnes Township. A possible exception is Katie, born about 1862, who may have been only
eight years old when the family moved away.

That move away can be dated with only moderate precision -- possibly as early as the summer of 1870,
and possibly as late as the autumn of 1872. The 1870 census shows the household still in place in Fair
Play. All of the (surviving) children were still at home aside from Peter, Jr., who is shown as a lodger
in a nearby dwelling. But by the winter of 1872-73, the whole gang was based in the city of Sacramento, as
demonstrated by the 1873 Sacramento city directory. Peter had finally given up on mining as an occupation.
He was well up into his fifties, and mining was work better suited to younger men. Another motivation for
relocating was that profitable ore around Fair Play was getting hard to find. Already the population of
the village had dwindled from its heyday. That helps explain why Elias, Peter, Jr., and Jacob chose not to
be miners, either. They knew they were more likely to earn a living in the city. The change of circumstances
must have been startling. The family had been living in a rustic and lightly populated mining village. Now
they were not just in a city, but right in the most urban part of the second-largest city in the state. The
directories and voter registers of the mid-1870s show the Hughes family members at a series of addresses,
but all of the spots they called home were located a few blocks northeast of the state capitol building.

Unfortunately for Susanna and Peter, being in Sacramento was quite likely the means of their doom. They were
away from the clean breezes of the foothills and down in the mosquito-ridden delta -- their neighborhood was
tucked into the nook where the American River dumps into the Sacramento River. Humanity crowded close on
every side, bringing them into proximity with vectors of any number of diseases. Peter developed an
infection -- perhaps due to injury, but more likely from a disease -- and died of septicimia 25 August 1875.
Susanna likewise did not make it to sixty years of age. She caught typhoid fever, which claimed her life 10
November 1878 at home at Fifteenth Street and D Street, Sacramento.

The graves of husband and wife are definitely in the Sacramento city cemetery complex, but that district now
encompasses a series of originally-separate cemeteries and given that no headstone for the couple can be
found there now, it is difficult to confirm the locale of the Hughes-family plot. The indexing system
used back in the 1800s seems to have changed. However, it would seem that Susanna and Peter were interred in
sequential graves in the Oddfellows Lawn section.

Susanna’s biological line of descent is probably extinct. No sign of any grandchild has turned up despite
years of research. In brief, these are the fates of Susanna’s offspring:

Elias Hughes appears to have stayed continuously in Sacramento from the early 1870s on up to the
second half of the 1880s. He became a machinist, and soon went to work at the Central Pacific Railroad
yard, helping to build and repair railroad cars. He lived with his parents until their deaths, and shared
a home with his little sister Katie for several years thereafter. By 1880, his job at the railroad yard was
to paint the cars. The last positive trace of Elias is an 1886 cemetery record. It was Elias who purchased
the grave plot and dealt with the funeral particulars when Katie was laid to rest beside her parents. Elias
may be the Elias Hughes who appears in the 1900 census and the 1900-1906 voter registers in Butte City,
Glenn County, CA as a machinist, but not all of the stats associated with the Glenn County individual are a
match for “the” Elias Hughes.

Peter Pence Hughes, Jr. was alive in 1870 as shown by the census. He probably came to Sacramento
with the others, but it’s hard to be sure of that since all Peter P. Hughes references in the mid-1870s
Sacramento city directories may apply only to his father. Any definite trace of the younger Peter ends
with 1870. He was twenty years old at that point.

David Hughes, as mentioned above, must have died in Fair Play as a child in the 1860s, possibly as
a very small child.

Catherine G. Hughes did not marry. Her name was still Hughes when she died in 1886. She is therefore
assumed never to have had children. In the late 1870s and early 1880s she kept house for her brother Elias.
There is however one indication she asserted her independence, if only slightly. She is shown in the 1884-85
Sacramento city directory as Miss Katie Hughes at 1623 H Street. This address was four blocks away from where
her sister Rachel was lodging. Elias meanwhile is shown as a roomer at the Central House, perhaps a boarding
facility for Central Pacific employees. Like her mother, Katie died of typhoid fever. Her date of death was 4
March 1886. She was twenty-three or twenty-four years old.

Jacob Strader Hughes cleaved to his family members throughout the 1870s, living at the same address
as his parents, and after his mother’s death, continuing to live with Elias and Katie for a year or so. He
had just ventured off on his own by the time the 1880 census was taken. He is shown in that source still in
Sacramento and still residing in the same neighborhood as his siblings, but at that point he was a lodger in
the home of blacksmith Parker Tripplet and family. By that time he was several years into his chosen
profession. Jacob was a plasterer. He continued to follow that occupation in Sacramento, then in Fresno in the
late 1880s, and then in San Luis Obispo County. He is the only one of the Hughes boys who can be shown to have
become a husband. His wife was Missouri-native Annie Davis, the surname Davis perhaps having been acquired
from an earlier husband. The pair were wed 19 July 1889 in Fresno. By then Annie was in her late thirties.
Whether the pair had offspring is unknown but it does not seem so. The last trace of Jacob is his entry on
the 1892 voter register for San Luis Obispo County when he was approximately thirty-eight years old. His
reason for relocating to that area may have been a family connection. His first cousin George Alton
Washington Bailey had recently moved there. The latter would live out a long life in Arroyo Grande Township.
If any family member touched base in person with Jacob Strader Hughes in 1892, it was George. Perhaps
George’s descendants will turn out to have some information that would reveal where Jacob met his end, no
matter whether that demise came in the early 1890s or many decades later.

That leaves Rachel Anna Hughes. She is the one member
of the family whose life story can be somewhat fully captured. She spent the whole stretch from the early
1870s to her death in the early 1920s as a resident of the city of Sacramento. For some of the 1870s, she
shared the same dwelling as other members of her family, the last instance being in 1879 with Elias, Jacob,
and Katie, but Rachel otherwise demonstrated an independent lifestyle from her early twenties onward,
supporting herself variously as a seamstress and spinner and then as a domestic servant. She wed three times.
Her first husband was Thomas Jefferson Clunie, an attorney who would go on to serve as a member of the U.S.
House of Representatives. The wedding occurred 23 March, 1873; however, the union ended immediately,
undoubtedly in the form of an annulment on grounds of bigamy. Thomas had married Florence Turton four weeks
earlier! One wonders how that scenario played out that spring. In the long term, we know the answer. Rachel
went back to using her maiden name. Thomas Clunie was still married to Florence decades later.

Rachel was still going by the last name of Hughes at the turn of the century when she became a live-in
housekeeper for an elderly man, Abraham Nusbaum, whose wife Lucretia had become too ill to cook and take
care of the home. Lucretia soon died, and in 1902, Rachel became the new Mrs. Nusbaum. She was soon widowed,
but the sequence of events meant that she had a home for the rest of her days. Abraham and Lucretia Nusbaum
had not had children, so Rachel inherited the 812 Eleventh Street residence they had owned and lived in
since the early 1870s. Rachel took on boarders to help make ends meet. In the early 1910s, one of those
incoming lodgers was Abraham Miller, twelve years her junior. History repeated itself, only in a flip-flop
way. Now it was Rachel who was the older of the set as she wed Abraham Miller in the summer of 1916. It is
accurate to say it was the only marriage that allowed her to settle in and be a spouse, as she had never
spent any meaningful interval living with Thomas Clunie and may not have ever had sexual relations with
Abraham Nusbaum due to his extreme age and decrepitude. She and her new Abe were a couple until her death.
The Grim Reaper came for her 23 December 1923, some seven and a half years into the marriage. Abe inherited
the house at 812 Eleventh Street. He remarried a few years after Rachel’s death and went on to live at that
same address at least into the mid-1940s. (That house, not far from the Capitol, no longer exists. The entire
block is now taken up by the huge building that serves as the headquarters of the California Environmental
Protection Agency.)

As mentioned above, no headstones now exist in the Sacramento City Cemetery district to commemorate Susanna
and Peter. It is probable none were ever commissioned, and the circumstances apply to all of their children
as well. However, in Rachel’s case, an inscription exists. Her name and statistics were added to the side of
the headstone of her husband Abraham Nusbaum and his first wife. (As shown above right.) The Nusbaum
grave lies a long walk away from the Hughes plot, and given that records say Rachel’s remains were buried
with her kinfolk, the inscription is a kind of red herring in terms of showing where her grave is. It’s unclear
if this peculiar situation means her widower was too cheap to commission an original headstone for her,
or if Rachel had made arrangements for her memorial to be handled in just that way, perhaps having set out
those instructions in the years before she wed Abe Miller. The latter scenario seems more likely to be true.

Elizabeth Strader

Elizabeth Strader married Jeremiah Frame 18 May
1842 in Jordan Township. Jerry, born 23 April 1812 in Bourbon County, KY, was a Lafayette County lead
miner. The couple spent about three decades residing in the border region of Lafayette and Green Counties
and their ten children were all born in one county or the other -- several of them in Martintown or its
outskirts. The tally of ten includes two daughters who died in early childhood. In 1874, Jerry acquired
the rights to a mine in Green County about half a mile northeast of the town of Monroe. The mine had
first been established thirty years earlier, but had remained productive. When owned and worked by John
Monahan from 1870 to 1872, it had yielded 50,000 pounds of lead. Despite a gloomy assessment of its
remaining potential, Jerry put in a couple of years of work there, only to turn out a meager 4,000
pounds. Disgusted, he gave up mining for good. He and Elizabeth moved in late 1874 or early 1875 to
Greene County, IA.

Many of the kids had come of age by 1875. Eldest son Elias had already moved away to Seward County, NE
in 1872. Son David decided to remain in Wisconsin. But the other six kids appear to have all made the
move to Greene County. This was true even in the case of Mary Jane and Jacob Silas (“Jake”), even
though both were by now married and had offspring and were no longer part of their parents’ household.
Elizabeth and Jerry apparently viewed Greene County as the place that would be their final home, as
they were both advanced enough in age not to want to “start over” yet again. But their plans did not
work out. The couple became dissatisfied with the heat and humidity of central Iowa and the resultant
tornadoes, so in 1879, when son Jake and his wife and kids came back to Lafayette County due to the
ill health Jake’s father-in-law was suffering through, Elizabeth and Jerry tagged along, saying farewell
to Iowa for good. Son William Patterson Frame did remain there, though. Apparently Will was not
as unhappy with the climate as were his parents. Mary Jane and her husband Isaac Rinehart joined Elias
Frame in Seward County, NE. This turn-of-the-decade juncture might have marked the moment when the
destinies of the eight kids diverged for good, but that was not the case. Soon most of the clan was
gathering itself back together.

In 1880, Jerry and Elizabeth moved to the Sand Hills
country of northern Nebraska. Who instigated this
is unclear. Probably it was Elias, who had decided he wasn’t doing well enough in Seward County in
eastern Nebraska and wanted to try again in a fresh spot. Regardless of who thought of it, nearly the
whole family seems to have become enthused by the possibilities and even a few members of the extended
family got in on the action, specifically Elizabeth’s sister Anna Catherine and her kids.

Elias homesteaded along Plum Creek at a locale between the spots where Johnstown and Ainsworth would
rise. The rest of the family properties were either adjacent or within a few miles. It was an odd sort
of place to try to fashion into their paradise. The vicinity was still bureaucratically unorganized,
not becoming Brown County until after their arrival. It was unsuitable for farming. Even at its
peak its white population did not exceed seven thousand people and is now half that. Eventually all of
the family members who gave the place a try in the 1880s would leave, the last of them departing by
1892. Elizabeth and Jerry would not live to see the final phase of the exodus. Brown County was their
final home. In their final years, Jerry helped his son with the maintenance of his farm. (Elias’s
house and yard are shown at right, viewed from a ridge looking down on Plum Creek. This was one of many
photographs taken 24 December 1890. A photographer had made his way there to the isolated locale for
the Christmas Day wedding of Elias’s daughter Rozella to William Adam Henry.) Elizabeth, no longer
obliged to care for children now that even her youngest had come of age, spent a brief interval in the
mid-1880s running a small boarding house in Johnstown for some extra cash (farm income simply not being
enough). Jerry died 20 January 1886. Elizabeth survived him by only a couple of years despite being so
much younger than he. She passed away 23 March 1888. Family accounts say Jerry died of pneumonia and
Elizabeth of cholera. Both were buried in Johnstown.

The California-based offspring of Elizabeth in 1901. Left to right, Will Frame, Jake Frame, and
Elias Frame, with their wives Theodosia Heater, Dora Sweeney, and Mary Catherine Trickle.

Anna Catherine Strader

Anna Catherine Strader -- better known by her middle
name and sometimes by a reversal of the first and middle names (Juliette Martin Savage refers to her
as “Aunt Katie Anne” in her 1947 letter, and she is called Katie Anne in a 1901 biography of her second
husband Henry Rush) -- initially married James Frame, who had been born 17 July 1820 in Preble County, OH.
The wedding took place 21 October 1849 in Jordan Township. The couple had three children -- David Patterson
Frame, Mary Rachel Frame, and Jacob Strader Frame. James was yet another Lafayette County lead miner.
However, he gave up the profession in the early 1850s, taking to farming a forty-acre parcel in Cadiz
Township, Green County. His abandonment of mining may have come too late. His health went bad by the
mid-1850s, perhaps an after-effect of lead poisoning,
though his daughter later attributed it to general overwork, recalling a time when her father collapsed
from heat stroke after a grueling day harvesting grain. James spent about four years as a semi-invalid
and then died 26 January 1861. He was buried in Kelly Cemetery. Katie Anne soon married Henry Rush, a
Bavarian immigrant and a veteran of the so-called Mexican War of 1846 to 1848, who just after the war
had settled in Martintown as a carpenter. He had been married twice before. Both wives had died young.
The first wife, Nancy Warren, had produced five children with Henry, including two that had died in
infancy. The second wife, Maria Shockley, had given birth to three more. Katie
Anne helped finish raising her Rush step-children in addition to caring for her Frame kids. She and
Henry did have one biological child together, but lost that one as an infant. Henry owned a great deal
of land in the Martintown area -- second only to Nathaniel Martin in the extent of his holdings -- and
in the 1870s was a key business associate of the Martin family, operating the Martintown hardware
store and conducting sales of building supplies and lumber, some of the latter product inevitably being
generated by the Martin sawmill. Henry remains a notable figure in Cadiz Township/Green County history,
among other things being the founder and sponsor of Rush Elementary School. During his lifetime he was
popular with his Martin in-laws, but it seems Katie Anne did not regard him as the best of spouses. This
led to a divorce in 1881, after all the children of the various marriages were grown. Henry would go on
in 1894 to wed Mary Golaxson, twenty-nine years his junior, to whom he remained married until his death
in 1913 in Martintown.

Having been unable
for one reason or another to count on the men in her life, Katie Anne took steps to control her destiny
a bit more. Among other measures, she learned to read and write at about sixty years of age. This gave
her more direct control over her assets -- she had kept title to the land she and James had owned in
Green County. She no longer cared to live near Henry Rush, though. She moved to Brown County, NE along
with her son Jacob Strader Frame and his new wife Hattie Radliff. Jacob and Hattie soon founded a farm
in the Ainsworth/Johnstown area close to the land belonging to Elizabeth and Jerry Frame. Katie Anne
continued to be a part of Jacob and Hattie’s household for the remainder of her days. Jacob in turn
became quite close with his cousins Elias, Jake, and Will Frame. When he returned from the west
recommending that they all move to the San Joaquin Valley of California, his advice was heeded. Jacob
and Hattie went first, bringing Katie Anne with them. She did not get to be a Californian for long,
though. She died 3 August 1893. Her grave is located at Porterville’s Home of Peace Cemetery.

The image of Katie Anne shown at right was scanned from a print manufactured during her lifetime,
found in 2012 amid the memorabilia that had belonged to her daughter-in-law Hattie Radliff Frame. The
color is artificial, added by the photographer. It is highly unlikely she was wearing lipstick when she
posed. The use of such dramatic red was a form of advertising for the photography studio, a way the
owner could declare, “Lookee here, isn’t it fantastic I can make photographs have bright colors?”
Unfortunately by modern standards the embellishment does not compliment her appearance. (Thank you to
Katie Anne’s great great grandson Bill Haskins, Jr. for finding and scanning it. Bill also found similar
portrait shots of Katie Anne’s children David, Rachel, and Jacob, which will be displayed here once their
mini-biographies are completed.)

Margaret Ellen Strader

Margaret Ellen Strader married Virignia-native
James Henry Eveland 27 February 1848 in Jordan Township. Like
Peter Hughes, James went to California to mine gold. Like her sister Susanna, Margaret remained
in Wisconsin and lodged with her parents. Both Peter and James returned to Wisconsin in the
early 1850s, but while Peter convinced Susanna to move the whole household to California, Margaret
persuaded James they should remain in Wisconsin. Margaret and James settled in as a farming family
near Monroe. From that point until she died Margaret's circumstances were as stable as any of the
Strader-Starr offspring, matched or exceeded in that regard only by Elizabeth and Hannah. Margaret
and James had nine children -- all boys. First was Millard, born 19 January 1849,
having been conceived before his father yielded to his case of gold fever. The youngest was George
Washington Eveland, born 8 August 1871 (or perhaps 1872). It was such a large brood and so lacking in
an older daughter to help keep house that in the late 1860s, with eight of the nine boys already born,
Margaret persuaded a neighbor girl, Lucinda Frame, to help out. Lucinda, who soon became Millard
Eveland’s wife, was a daughter of Thomas Alexander Frame and Sarah Devoe. As mentioned
in Hannah’s
biography, Thomas Frame was the man Hannah was “supposed” to marry, which would have created a fourth
Frame/Strader union in the same generation, a scheme that Hannah’s preference for Nathaniel Martin
thwarted. Sarah Devoe was a sister of Loren Devoe who, as mentioned above, married Millard’s first
cousin Mary Jane Swearingen, the daughter
of Margaret’s sister Polly. While Millard and Lucinda were not actually blood relatives, theirs was in
a sense a marriage of first cousins, because Lucinda’s uncles Jeremiah, James, and Silas Frame were all
brothers-in-law of Millard’s mother.

Today the tally of Margaret’s descendants is quite high, in the same league with Elizabeth and Hannah.
The number would be reaching the ceiling if not for the shockwave created by her death. Margaret passed
away in Monroe Township 6 January 1879 before she could finish raising her younger kids and before any
of her boys other than Millard had settled in with spouses. (Margaret’s grave, shown at left, is at
Kelly Cemetery near her parents.) James Eveland apparently found himself unable to cope
with being a single father. He moved to Phillips County, KS and spent his final couple of decades as a
widower farmer, not even living in the same state as any of his sons until he joined Millard and family
in Thurston County, NE at the very end of the century. Inasmuch as the parents were not in Green County to
serve as anchorage, the nine boys scattered far and wide. Though all
eventually married, many did so well into adulthood and sired very small families, the most extreme example
being second son Daniel, who did not wed until he was turning seventy and who had no children at all.
Only one son lingered long-term in southern Wisconsin. That was David Francis Eveland, who dwelled right
in Martintown in the 1890s and thereafter lived out his days nearby in Wiota, Lafayette County, WI. He
married his first cousin, once removed Nancy Anna Black (also known as Anna Black), a granddaughter of
Mary Ann Marie “Polly” Strader Swearingen Frame. The other Eveland boys left by no later than the early
1890s to a variety of locales in Iowa, Nebraska, and later, Minnesota, South Dakota, Idaho, and
Washington. Only a small fraction of them appear to have kept in touch with one another. The rift was
probably widest in the cases of the two youngest sons, Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Eveland and George
Washington Eveland. Frank was only eleven when his mother died, and was fostered by his cousin Rhoda Frame
Whitehead, daughter of Polly Strader (and an aunt of Anna Black). George, only seven or eight when Margaret
died, must have been similarly shipped out, precise circumstances unclear, and as an adult very much forged
a separate path of his own in Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota. In a twist of fate that echoed his own
youth, George was unable to be a day-to-day parent to his firstborn son Leo, born in 1897, the cause being
a divorce from Leo’s mother in late 1900 or early 1901.

The reason the Eveland clan eventually became substantial in number is because those who did found families
tended to create huge ones. George Washington Eveland sired eleven kids with his second wife, making him
father of twelve counting Leo. Millard and Lucinda’s son James had thirteen children
with his wife Mary Julia Styer. A strikingly large fraction of the greater clan is doubly related due to
marriages of cousins or multiple unions within the same two families, a la the pattern shown among the
Starrs and Weitzels, Straders and Frames, et al. Not only was there the union of David Francis Eveland
and Anna Black, but soon after James Eveland (Margaret’s fifthborn son) married his bride Iva Mae Hiserote
in 1888, his niece Anna Isabel Eveland (daughter of Millard) married Iva’s brother Charles Hiserote. In
the Twentieth Century, a number of members of the Eveland/Styer branch married members of the same Allen
clan in Idaho.

Daniel Strader

Daniel Strader worked for Nathaniel Martin as a
young man, and while doing so boarded with Hannah and Nathaniel. He was no doubt a welcome presence during
the 1858 episode of insanity that incapacitated Nathaniel for a time. Daniel married Sarah Jane Mace 16
August 1862. The wedding took place four days after he had enlisted in the Union Army (obviously before he
reported for duty). He served in the 31st Regiment, Wisconsin Infantry and died in the war, perhaps of an
infected wound, at Columbus, Hickman County, KY. His date of death was 29 July 1863. He is credited with
having sired Harriet Almetta Strader, who supposedly was born 14 January 1864. Chances are this date is
wrong and the year should be 1863, meaning that Sarah was a pregnant bride. If the birth year of 1864 is
correct, it implies Daniel obtained a furlough in the late spring of 1863 or that Sarah was able to visit
him. By the time of the birth or shortly after Sarah moved back to her birth home in Muskinghum County,
OH and soon went on to Poweshiek County, IA, where she would spend the rest of her long life, dying in
1922. In 1869 she married Levi Walker Ferneau, settled with him on a farm near the town of Montezuma,
and produced six children with him in addition to raising Hattie. (Shown at right is Sarah’s gravemarker
at the Oddfellows Cemetery in Montezuma, OH.) Because Hattie was never a part of the lives of the
Straders of Green County, her existence is not mentioned in any of the original early and mid-20th Century
genealogical notes made by Hannah’s descendants or her sisters’ descendants -- the notes that were so
central in the creation of this essay. Hattie had to be rediscovered in a genealogy posted on the internet.
This forgotten-kin aspect is somewhat of an irony because Hattie did not die until 1951, meaning she
survived to a later calendar date than any grandchild of Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr except two who
made it to the late 1950s -- George Washington Eveland (himself another near-forgotten grandchild) and
Bessie R. Strader. Whereas at one time Daniel Strader’s line was thought to have been extinguished
before it had the chance to be founded, the list of his known descendants is now substantial and some are
presumed to be alive today, springing from the five children Hattie had with first husband James Oliver
Briney.

John Starr Strader

With dad Jacob Strader dead as of 1865 and brother Daniel a
casualty of the war, it was up to John Starr Strader to step up and become the patriarch of the
family. He slipped into the role somewhat gradually, not giving up his bachelor ways until his thirtieth
birthday. His bride was Adelaide D. Blair -- Addie -- with whom he settled on a farm in Jordan Township
and then, late 1869 or early 1870, in Clarno Township.
Over time the Blair clan and the Straders would come to be associated genealogically in multiple ways,
but John and Addie’s wedding appears to have been the first manifestation of that entanglement.
Unfortunately that bond was active a distressingly short time because Addie perished 24 September 1870,
less than two years into the marriage. She left two sons motherless -- Homer Herbert Strader, born
4 May 1869, and Sebert Blair Strader (known as Bertie and later as Bert), born in July, 1870 and
therefore only a couple of months old when deprived of his mother. Unlike many men of his era,
John neither fostered out his offspring nor did he marry again at once.
He was willing to take on the challenge of being a single father. Perhaps he had been too fond of Addie to
bear the thought of replacing her while his memories of her were still fresh. He was a widower for over
seven years. His mother, despite her advanced age, probably was the factor that allowed him to keep the boys
with him. Rachel had been part of his household before the tragedy and would continue to be a part of it
during the 1870s. John may have also combined forces with his little sister Rhoda, particularly after
Rhoda’s husband John Campbell died and she, too, was left with two young children. Or it could easily be
that John, like so many other members of the clan, was rescued by the childcare efforts of his big sister
Polly.

Finally on 23 February 1878, John wed Henrietta E. Harris of Sturgis, St. Joseph County, MI. At thirty-four
years old, Etta was not a young bride -- she would be referred to as an “old maid school teacher” by
Juliette Savage in the 1947 letter -- but she was young enough to bear John two more children, Bessie R.
Strader (middle name probably Rachel), born 10 May 1881, and John Stanley Strader, born in May,
1884.

In May 1880, when Esau Johnson came down from Sparta, WI to visit the many relatives he had in southern
Green County, WI, John was one of the cousins he stayed with. By then, Esau was about to turn eighty and
John was forty-two, and yet the two first cousins had never before met.

John’s farm in Clarno Township was a thriving concern, described in an 1884 profile of the county as 240
acres of good farmland, and abundant with fine hardwood timber, which John harvested in the winters when his
crop work was on hiatus, selling it in the form of lumber and railroad ties. His brother-in-law Nathaniel
Martin’s mill no doubt played a role in processing that bounty.

In 1896 -- or about then -- the family relocated to
Dell Prairie Township, Adams County, WI, moving on to land John had just purchased about four miles north
of the village of Kilbourn. John had perhaps exhausted the supply of timber on his Clarno Township acreage
to the degree that he craved a piece of less-exploited property with which he could continue usual winter
occupation. The move happened just as eldest son Homer, having completed training as a veterinary surgeon,
was really to settle down. Homer and his bride Alice Catherine Shank -- a former Monroe High School classmate
of his -- farmed an adjacent piece of property. Bert, Bessie, and Stanley remained with John and Etta.

In the early autumn of 1902, Homer died of septic
poisoning from an infection in the wound he had sustained
three months earlier when his thigh had been shattered by the kick of a horse -- perhaps one of the horses
Homer had been doctoring. The impact had caused the bone to protrude out through the skin, and the damage was
so severe Homer was bedridden from that point until his death. Widow Alice Shank Strader retreated back to
Monroe to the security of her birth family, which removed John and Etta from routine contact with their only set
of grandchildren -- Homer Iliffe Strader (born 29 September 1898) and Ula Kathryn Strader (born 15 March
1901). The emotional anguish appears to have dimmed John and Etta’s affection for the Dell Prairie Township
farm. The couple soon moved to Rock County, WI. Bert, now in this thirties, chose to stay in Kilbourn, so
the household was reduced to John and Etta and Bessie and Stanley -- which is a way of saying it was now as
much a Harris family unit as a Strader one. This was a defining change, because from this point in his life John
behaved more as a member of Etta’s family than of his own. This surely was not out of any dissatisfaction
with his blood kin, but simply “the way things turned out.” They had only been in Rock County a brief
time when a new opportunity presented itself. Etta’s sister Carrie, who as a young bride had lived
with John and Etta, had long since moved to southeastern Virginia with her husband Boyd Henry. John and Etta
decided to follow suit -- a huge change given that both husband and wife were people of the northern
portion of the nation, very much Yankees and not at all Dixie folk. Yet they went, departing in the latter
part of 1905 or the first part of 1906.

With Bessie and Stanley, John and Etta settled within so-called “Tidewater Virginia” on a farm on the south
bank of the Pamunkey River in New Kent County, VA. The area was and still is very lightly settled and still
has no place-name designation that has stuck. The farm was located in a swath of land between Cooks Mill
Road and the river, very near Chestnut Grove, the birthplace of Martha Washington, and upstream of the tiny
village of West Point (which is on the opposite bank in Prince William County). The Straders themselves
called it Brett or Brette, which appears to be a name no one else
used. Another name bandied about at the time was Cousiac. Censustakers designated it part of Black Creek
Township in 1870, and part of Cumberland Magisterial District during the period when John and Henrietta
lived there. When John purchased the parcel, it was still called the Col. Gordon plantation after former
owner William Westmore Gordon, an attorney famous for his role in the Civil War as a Confederate Army
officer and a man often labelled a hero of the South for his resolute part in the First Battle of Manassas
(aka First Battle of Bull Run), though he had only dwelled upon the property for at most half a dozen years
right after the war, leaving it behind for good in 1871. These days residents of the area have Lanexa
addresses. John’s relatives back home, hearing the word “plantation,” may have pictured a setting invoking
the antebellum South connotation of the word, with huge fields of cotton and/or tobacco and a large number
of resident laborers. But it was just a farm. Even though John was on the brink of seventy years old when
he arrived, he actively managed the acreage, using it mainly for the raising of purebred swine. The only
other adult male workers living on the land consisted of Stanley and one farm hand, Sam Braxton, a young
man of color. The latter’s household included his young wife, two small children, and an adolescent female
cousin.

Daughter Bessie went off to nursing school in Boston within a
couple of years of the move to Brett. She
returned in 1909 and lived at home for a period, but as she found employment in her profession, ranged
farther and farther away. Stanley went out 29 January 1910 in a small sailboat on the Pamunkey River with
Clem Meekins, a local fisherman (quite possibly a relative of the Braxtons). Neither could swim, and when
a gust of wind capsized their boat about three hundred yards from the dock out in the middle of the
river, they could not swim to shore. They hung on to the overturned craft for half an hour, crying out for
help. John grabbed
a dinghy and tried to reach them, but only had a plank of wood as a paddle, and the tide carried him beyond
them and forced him up against the bank. Helpless to stop it, John, Henrietta, and Clem’s wife Rosa watched
in horror as the two young men lost their strength in the chilly January water and eventually slipped under
the surface. Clem’s body was never found. Forty days passed until Stanley’s body turned up. By the time those
remains made their belated way into the care of a mortician, John and Etta had decided the burial place would
be in her family’s section at Oak Lawn Cemetery in Sturgis. This in turn ensured that John and Etta would
themselves be buried at Oak Lawn when the time came. (Which is a way of saying John is not buried with his
first family. The graves of Addie and her children and grandchildren are at Greenwood and Bethel cemeteries
of Monroe, WI.)

(Shown at left is the section of the Pamunkey River where
Stanley drowned. Photo taken by Connie and Dave Smeds 4 November 2014. The river is so wide along this part
of New Kent County that it is more of a bay than a river.)

In the spring of 1912, John and Etta bought Boyd and Carrie’s farm half a dozen miles north of Williamsburg
near the village of Norge, and immediately moved there while Boyd and Carrie shifted to a rented farm nearby.
Though the location was new, John used the land for the same purpose as the old one, i.e. for the raising of
purebred pigs. The farm may have still been the couple’s home when Etta died 1 November 1917. Her demise was
yet another family tragedy. She dropped a container of kerosene and somehow the spilled liquid -- some of
which had drenched her skirts, caught fire. John was not there at that particular hour. Neighbors rushed over
and succeeded in quenching the flames. The kitchen was not badly damaged, but Etta’s burns proved fatal. John
was now a widower for the second time and would not marry again. He moved to Richmond. It must be noted, though,
that one reference points to him being based in Richmond as early as mid-1917, meaning he and Etta were already
there when she had her awful accident. The relocation meant John was within easy reach of Carrie and Boyd, who
had likewise gravitated to Richmond. John died 23 March 1923. All sources say he died in Richmond. He appears
however in the 1920 census in rural Henrico County, so it is worth wondering if his death actually occurred
within the city limits or simply “near” Richmond.

At the present time, John’s surviving clan consists of only a handful of individuals. Stanley had not married
nor produced offspring by the time he drowned at age twenty-five. Sebert likewise was childless. He was blessed
by a relatively long life, though -- certainly a long life compared to his poor brothers. Bert continued to
reside in Kilbourn. He served as the clerk of Dell Prairie Township
for many years. He appears to have still been there as of his final few weeks of life, by which time the place
was no longer known Kilbourn, having taken on the name Wisconsin Dells. When Bert’s final decline came upon
him, he was hospitalized in nearby Baraboo, Sauk County, WI, and that is where he died 27 September 1946 at
age seventy-six.

As mentioned, Bessie Strader returned from nursing school to
her parents’ New Kent County farm in 1909. Her first jobs as a nurse were in nearby parts of Virginia such
as Norfolk, Richmond, and Petersburg. She had already remained single through her twenties and would continue
in this fashion through her thirties. She may have been adamant about keeping her independence, i.e.
she may have been profoundly unwilling to let herself be encumbered by a husband. Her choice to be a career
woman despite possessing a substantial degree of beauty prompted her uncle Boyd Henry to imply she must be
a lesbian -- or words to that effect. The characterization may have been accurate, but in that
era, Bessie did not dare let the accusation stand uncontested, so she sued Boyd for slander and defamation
of character April, 1913 in court in Williamburg, asking for $5,000 in damages. (To give an idea of how
much that sum was worth in 1913, that same year John’s grand nephew Bert Warner purchased a house in Sanger,
CA for $6,000, and Bert could have found one for less if he had been willing to settle for a fixer-upper
instead of a quality residence constructed only two years earlier.) In the late 1910s Bessie became a
chiropractor in South Carolina, basing herself in Anderson in 1920, in Greenville in
1921, back to Anderson from 1922 to 1927, and in Spartanburg in the late 1920s onward. Despite the
possibility that she may have been a lesbian, she wed Richard T. Durham in approximately 1922. She was
already in her forties and the union does not appear to be for purposes of procreation, but for
maintenance of reputation. Richard Durham may even have
been disabled and marrying him was one way she could serve as his caregiver while simultaneously not
having to make excuses why she and her spouse slept in separate beds. He appears to have passed away
in the early 1930s. In 1935, Bessie wed dentist Leroy Feltz Crenshaw. This does look like a “real”
marriage. There is ample sign they were fond of one another, and she immediately began using the public
name of Mrs. L.F. Crenshaw -- she had not in the 1920s been known as Mrs. Richard Durham except on
rare occasions. That said, the union does give the impression of having been a “Hollywood Marriage”
à la Rock Hudson’s marriage to Phyllis Gates, i.e. one that put the spouses in the limelight of
society but did not involve the usual sort of conjugal behavior in private. Bessie continued to
earn her own income independent of her husband. She purchased (or perhaps already had purchased) a
peach farm of over 150 acres near the hamlet of Thicketty in Cherokee County, SC between the towns of
Cowpens and Gaffney. She and Feltz may or may not have dwelled upon that acreage. If not, their residence
was in Cowpens, which meant Bessie would have had only a short commute to supervise her orchards, and Feltz
would have had only a slightly longer commute in the opposite direction to reach his dental office in
Spartanburg. Bessie passed away in either the second half of 1958 or the first few weeks of 1959. The
Gaffney Ledger edition of 17 June 1958 notes that she had just given her farm to Feltz. This surely
means she had been diagnosed as terminal and wanted to avoid tangling up the real estate in the ordeal of
a probate process. She
was dead by no later than 16 February 1959, because Feltz filed a legal notice that day as the executor of
her estate. Feltz did not survive her by much. He passed away in Spartanburg 21 November 1959. (Bessie was
the very last grandchild of Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr to perish. Even if we assume she only survived
to the second half of June, 1958, that still means she outlasted her cousin George Washington Eveland by
several weeks.)

Homer Herbert Strader’s date of death was 10 September 1902. He
died in a hospital in Tomah, Green County, WI
in the wake of an unsuccessful operation to try to deal with the septic poisoning. In some ways, given the
severity of his injury and the lack of antibiotics, his death had been certain ever since the horse had kicked
him in May, 1902. This was not the only loss his poor wife would suffer that decade. Homer Iliffe Strader
became ill in late 1907 -- probably with tuberculosis though available sources do not specify what type of
chronic condition he had -- and succumbed to the disease 13 April 1909 at home in Monroe. Ula fortunately would
have far better luck as far as health and longevity were concerned. She lived to be almost ninety-seven. She
became a stenographer in Washington, DC in her late teens, and went on to get a degree at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison. After graduation in 1926, she spent a brief interval in Louisville, KY before moving to
Chicago, IL, where in 1928 she married Gerald Llewellyn Tyler. They spent their eleven-year marriage in Chicago
and its suburbs of Evanston and Oak Park. The couple had two children. The first, born in Chicago in 1933, was
stillborn. The other, Alice Catherine Tyler (1939-2005), was still an infant (or even still in the womb) when
Ula and Gerald parted ways. From 1939 onward, Ula was
based in Monroe, with possible brief exceptions, such as an interval in the mid-1940s when she appears
to have lived in Winslow, IL. She never married again, but maintained a close emotional bond and
association in Monroe with her mother, her stepfather Jacob Huffman, and with her aunt Dora Shank Crosby
and uncle Anson Newell Crosby. Together with these relatives, Ula invested in commercial property in
Pocahontas, Buena Vista County, IA -- such investment being one indication Ula did well financially in
spite of the lack of a spouse. Ula remained very active in lodge functions and various clubs and
charitable societies. Not all of that was volunteer work. In the 1940s, she was a Green County
employee assigned to the child welfare department, responsible for the program devoted to finding homes
for abandoned children.

Ula passed away 16 January 1998 in Monroe, within a few miles from the place her Strader ancestors had settled
more than one hundred fifty years earlier. Inasmuch as her first child was stillborn, Ula’s entire
surviving line, and therefore John Starr Strader’s entire surviving line, flows through Alice Catherine
Tyler.

Rhoda Carolyn Strader

Rhoda Carolyn Strader married John B. Campbell. John was a son of William and Margaret Campbell.
Born and raised in Muskingum County, OH, he had come to Green County as a young man. He and Rhoda were
married 21 September 1865 in Monroe after he had served in the Civil War. The pair immediately settled
on a farm in Jordan Township. In the early 1870s, they moved to Clarno Township. They became parents of
three children, including one that died as a baby. The children who survived were daughters Nellie
(full name Rachel Eleanor Campbell) and Anna, both born in the latter half of the 1860s. John died some
time in the second half of 1870s. (Born about 1836, he may not even have reached forty years of
age.) The 1880 census shows Rhoda living as a widow in Cadiz Township, the household consisting of
herself, her daughters, and her mother Rachel Starr Strader. They were probably dwelling in or near
Martintown. She did not remarry until 1890, after both Nellie and Anna had reached adulthood and become
wives and mothers. Rhoda’s second husband was William George Dunell, son of Charles Dunell and Anna
Gaines. William had been born in England and had raised three kids in Senatchwine, Pulham County, IL and
Tullahoma, Coffee County, TN with his first wife, Mary Elizabeth “Louisa” Burnhart. William may have
been introduced to Rhoda through her nephew William Patterson Frame of Greene County, IA. Rhoda and William
enjoyed only a relatively brief marriage because William passed away within a few years -- the precise date
is unclear except to say that he was gone by the time the 1900 census was recorded. No children resulted
from the union inasmuch as the wedding took place after Rhoda had reached the end of her childbearing
years -- in fact, the ceremony occurred on her forty-eighth birthday. Rhoda spent much of her second
widowhood employed as a live-in housekeeper in Green County. After 1905 she was Hannah’s only surviving
sister and is known to have visited Hannah a number of times, and even moved in for a while in 1905 to
help Hannah cope with her new widowhood. Eventually Rhoda resumed live-in housekeeper arrangements, the
last of those apparently covering the summer of 1913 in Eleroy in Stephenson County about a dozen miles
south of Martintown. The Eleroy chapter was followed by what appears to be a substantial stay with Hannah,
beginning in October, 1913 and continuing for at least a year. Some time in the mid-1910s, Rhoda’s health
became a concern, and it would appear to be at that point she moved to the farm of her daughter Anna and
son-in-law Silas Keller in Clarno Township. The property was near Monroe. She may have had her own house
(or cottage) there, rather than crowding in with Anna and Silas, who still had at least three children
that had yet to fledge from the nest. Rhoda died at her residence of pneumonia 25 October 1915. Her remains
were interred two days later at Staver Cemetery in Clarno Township.

Rhoda’s daughter Nellie wed Ezra Josiah Wickwire 6 April 1884 in Cadiz Township and at the end of the
1880s or beginning of the 1890s moved with him to Iowa. Over a fifteen-year
span she and Ezra had five children, then she married Ezra’s brother Fred Wickwire,
with whom she had three more. In the early 1900s she and Fred moved to Nebraska, and then in about 1916
on to Wyoming, where Nellie passed away in 1940. Her offspring settled variously in Nebraska, Wyoming,
and Twin Falls, ID and descendants remain in all those places. Anna Campbell produced a family line with
Silas Keller that for the most part has lingered in southern Wisconsin, mostly in Rock County and Green
County. Descendants can be found in there to this day. They include members of the Coplien clan of
Monroe.

Jacob Strader, Jr.

Jacob Strader, Jr. died in infancy shortly after the family reached Green County. Juliette Savage
attributed his death to tuberculosis, but she may have been guessing at the cause.